One thing I’ve noticed is that on Gameboy Color, there appears to be actually less allowable colors on screen, however Gameboy Color games seem to in general look impressive compared to most NES games. I have a bit of technical understanding but I bet there’s a lot of folks out there who really know their stuff when it comes to the hardware specs and limitations.
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The 8,16,32,64 bits were just used to refer to the addressable memory range for the CPU.
8 bits means it could address up to 2^8 addresses, etc etc. We have been at 64 bits for the last 15 years or so and CPU/GPU performance has advanced a lot. Performance all depends on the specific hardware design.
It was used as an advertising term back in the day to indicate how advanced a console was but it was practically speaking a rather meaningless metric.
The differences in the graphics quality are due to the different hardware used in the two. One is a console that connects to AC and has the ability to use a lot of power and has space to cool. The other is a compact system run off batteries.
Well keep in mind in addition to the bit size there were a lot of technological advancements. The GBC processor was 3 times faster than the one in the NES (you can see them on wiki). The GameBoy Color cartridges also supported up to 8 MB of data, while NES cartridges only had 512 KB of space at best (increased over time). So you could store far more graphics data in GBC games and still have more room for the plot and whatever else.
The main difference is related to the number of available palettes and palette slots.
On the NES, games are limited to 4 background palettes and 4 sprite palettes at any one time, plus an overall background color. Each background palette consists of 3 colors, plus a special value for “transparent” (which is how the overall background color gets shown). Each sprite palette also consists of 3 colors, plus a special value for “transparent”. This means that, without special tricks, the NES can only show 25 colors on the screen at one time.
On the GameBoy Color, games have twice as many palettes to work with: 8 background palettes and 8 sprite palettes. In addition, the background palettes can each have their own color for the fourth slot, instead of it being “transparent”. This means a GBC game can show 56 colors on the screen at one time.
Aside from these differences, the NES and GBC have very similar graphics systems, with similar kinds of limitations.
The fact that they are both “8-bit” doesn’t really have anything to do with their graphics. It’s more related to how the programming works, and the benefits of the “bits” aren’t always noticeable to users. For example, the N64 was a 64-bit system, but the Wii and Wii U were 32-bit systems.
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