This sheet prints on one A4 or Letter page without the site around it: use your browser’s Print command. The teacher’s notes under the sheet are not printed. Pupils need The 16-Bit Hall open to answer.
Eracade Era Museum · Worksheet 3 of 8
The 16-Bit Hall, 1990–1996
NameDate
Read the 16-Bit Hall (about twenty minutes), then answer in your own words.
What does “16-bit” really describe, and what mattered more to the artists?
Use the train window to explain parallax scrolling.
What is dithering, and why did it look smoother on an old television?
What did shoulder buttons give the player?
How did shareware get games to people?
Look closely
In the Palette toy, turn dithering on and off at 4 colours. Stand back from the screen. How many colours do you think you can see? How many are really there?
Make your own
Sketch a scene in three layers: a far sky, middle hills and a near fence. Beside each layer, write how fast it should scroll, as a fraction of the fence’s speed.
SkyHillsFence
Printed from eracade.com/museum/hall/16-bit/
For teachers: where each answer is in the hall
The glass: the width of the processor’s data paths, mostly a label; the video chip and its palettes mattered more.
Parallax: near things pass fast, far things slowly; layers moving at different speeds read as depth.
Dithering: two colours in a pattern blend into a third; the soft CRT edges blurred the pattern further.
The input: two more actions without taking a thumb off the main controls.
The room: the first episode was given away and the rest sold; disks were passed hand to hand.
The look-closely and make-your-own tasks have no single right answer. Ask pupils to explain their choice in one sentence.
