More content on graphics for old school gamers in this great video, especially for Apple II and Atari 2600 aficionados. It details how graphics worked on monochrome screens and color screens using 8 bits of memory. Apple II graphics used only 16 colors in low resolution mode and 6 colors in high resolution mode, not bad for a machine that came out in 1977.
Many of us spent hours, if not days in front of Ataris, Commodores, Nintendos and other old school gaming systems. Playing colorful games was then possible on 8 kB, 16kB and 32 kB video RAM. An excellent video from digg.com shows how colors were coded on those early gaming consoles and also details how pixels sprites were used to deliver descent graphics.