64 Bits Gamer

[Cecila Dammrich]

TheSparkFun gamer:bit is a fun-filled "carrier" board for the micro:bit that, when combined with the micro:bit, provides you with a fully functional game system. Designed in a similar form factor to the classic Nintendo NES controller, the gamer:bit is equipped with a four-direction "D-pad" on the left side of the board and two action buttons on the right side of the board. The two push buttons on the micro:bit in the center function as start and select.

The gamer:bit connects to the micro:bit via an edge connector in the center of the board, making setup easy. This creates a handy way to swap out micro:bits for programming, while still providing reliable connections to all of the different pins on the micro:bit. We have also included several poke home connectors on the back of the board that correspond to each button on the gamer:bit, allowing you to use external parts to control your game!

The micro:bit is a pocket-sized computer that lets you get creative with digital technology. Between the micro:bit and our shield-like bit boards you can do almost anything while coding, customizing and controlling your micro:bit from almost anywhere! You can use your micro:bit for all sorts of unique creations, from robots to musical instruments and more. At half the size of a credit card, this versatile board has vast potential!

Not really. The only connection points are the edge connector on the board and it would probably be more trouble that it is worth to try to solder wires to it to connect to the Uno. Fo the Uno I recommend the Joystick Shield Kit or just getting the Wireless Joystick Kit which has a Arduino compatible microcontroller on the board already.

8-bit and 16-bit, for video games, specifically refers to the processors used in the console. The number references the size of the words of data used by each processor. The 8-bit generation of consoles (starting with Nintendo's Famicom, also called Nintendo Entertainment System) used 8-bit processors; the 16-bit generation (starting with NEC/Hudson's PC Engine, also called TurboGrafx-16) used a 16-bit graphics processor. This affects the quality and variety in the graphics and the music by affecting how much data can be used at once; Oak's answer details the specifics of graphics.

A bit or binary digit is the basic unit of information in computing and telecommunications; it is the amount of information that can be stored by a digital device or other physical system that can usually exist in only two distinct states.

Now, note that in modern times, things like "8-bit music" and "16-bit graphics" don't necessarily have anything to do with processors or data size, as most machinery doesn't run that small anymore. They may instead refer specifically to the style of music or graphics used in games during those generations, done as a homage to nostalgia. 8-bit music is the standard chiptune fare; the graphics were simplistic in terms of colour. 16-bit music is higher quality but often still has a distinct electronic feel, while the graphics got much more complex but still largely 2-dimensional and 240p resolution.

8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit and 64-bit all refer to a processor's word size. A "word" in processor parlance means the native size of information it can place into a register and process without special instructions. It also refers to the size of the memory address space. The word size of any chip is the most defining aspect of it's design. There are several reasons why it is so important:

The difference in word size has a dramatic impact on the capabilities and performance of a given chip. Once you get up to 32-bits, the differences mainly become those of refinement (unless you are running a really big application, like genetic analysis or counting all the stars in the galaxy big).

The term "8-bit graphics" literally means that every pixel uses 8 bits for storing the color value - so only 256 options. Modern systems use 8 bits to store each color channel, so every pixel typically uses 24 bits.

The same applies for music, 8 bit means a maximum of 256 levels of your sound output level (per sample, the temporal resolution is another issue), which is too coarse to provide sounds that do not sound Chiptune (or noisy, if still trying PCM sound) to the human ear. 16 bits per sample is what the CD standard uses, by the way. But 16 bit music more refers to Tracker music, whose limits are similar to those of popular game consoles with a 16 bit processor.

Another interesting point is that an 8 bit input device is limited1 to 8 boolean button states split up into the four directions of the D-pad plus four buttons. Or a 2 button joystick with 3 bits (a mere 8 levels, including the sign!) remaining for both the x- and y-axis.

So, for originally old games, 8 bit / 16 bit might be considered referring to the system's capabilities (but consider Grace's point about the incosistency in the label "8 bit"). For a retro game, consider the question whether it would be theoretically possible to obey the mentioned constraints (neglecting shader effects like Bloom), although you might have to allow some "cheating" - I'd consider a sprite based game using 8x16 squares sprites still 8 bit even if sprites could be floating at any position in HD resolution and the squares were 16x16 pixels each...

1) well obviously you can use 2 times 8 bit to circumvent that limit, but as BlueRaja points out in a comment on Grace's answer, considering the accumulator register to be 8 bit only as well, that would cause a performance loss. Also, it would be cheating your way to 16 bit IMHO

Way back in the day the bit size of a CPU was a reference to how wide the processors registers where. A CPU typically has several registers in which you can move data around and do operations on it. For example add 2 numbers together then store the results in another register. In the 8 bit era the registers were 8 bits wide and of you had a big number like 4000 it wouldn't fit in a single register so your would have to do two operations to simulate a 16 bit operation. For example if you have got 10,000 gold coins you would need to use to add instructions to add them together. One to handle the lower 8bits and another to add the upper 8bits(With carrying taken into account). Where as a 16bit system could have just done it in one operation. You may remember in the legend of Zelda you would max out at 255 rupees as its the largest unsigned 8bit number possible.

Nowadays registers in a CPU come in all different sizes so this isn't really good measure anymore. For example the SSE Registers in the amd64 processors of today are 256 bits wide(For real) but the processors are still considered 64 bit. Lately these days most people are thinking of the addressing size the CPU is capable of supporting. It seems the bit size of a machine is really based on the current trends of hardware of the time. But for me I still consider the size of a native integer register which seems correct even today and still matches the addressing size of the CPU as well. Which makes since since the native integer size of a register is typically the same size as a memory pointer.

Despite all the interesting technical discussions provided by other contributors, the 8-bit and 16-bit descriptors for gaming consoles don't mean anything consistently. Effectively, 16-bit is only meaningful as a marketing term.

Most 8-bit consoles had 16-bit physical addressing space (256 bytes wouldn't get you very far.) They used segmenting schemes but so did the Turbo Grafx 16. The Genesis had a cpu capable of 32-bit addressing.

Total possible color palette is owned by the graphics circuitry and however the palette table is expressed is for its needs. You wouldn't expect this to have much correlation across systems, and it doesn't.

This doesn't fully describe graphics capabilities of the systems even in terms of colors, which had other features like special layer features, or specifics of their sprite implementations or other details. However, it does accurately portray the bit depth of the major features.

So you can see there are many features of systems which can be measured in bit-size which don't have a requirement to agree, and there is no particular grouping around any feature that is 16-bit for consoles grouped this way. Moreover, there is no reason to expect that consumers would care at all about word size or data paths. You can see that systems with "small" values here were regardless very capable gaming platforms for the time.

Essentially "16-bit" is just a generation of consoles which received certain marketing in a certain time period. You can find a lot more commonality between them in terms of overall graphics capability than you can in terms of any specific bitness, and that makes sense because graphics innovation (at a low cost) was the main goal of these designs.

"8-bit" was a retroactive identification for the previous consoles. In the US this was a the dominant Nintendo Entertainment System and the less present Sega Master System. Does it apply to an Atari 7800? A 5200? An Intellivision? An atari 2600 or colecovision or an Odyssey 2? Again, there is no bitness boundary that is clear among these consoles. By convention, it probably only includes the consoles introduced from around 1984 to 1988 or so, but this is essentially a term we apply now that was not used then and refers to no particular set of consoles, except by convention.

When talking about the the retro gaming 8bit, 16bit, and 64bit. It simply means the amount of pixels used to create the images for example the NES and Sega Mega Drive are very blocky and has large pixels 8bit the SNES and Sega Genesis improve this to "16 bit" and the N64 masters this concept to 64-bit and so on to 128 to 256 and eventually to 1080 HD. Even though it is and was slightly out of context.

Nintendo power in the early 90s actually created these "terms" when they released articles about how Nintendo 8bit power was so much better then Sega. Each to their own but anyways they did this because 99% of the people would have no clue what they were actually talking about.

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