[RuggedPineapple]

Exactly this. Most consoles of the era were set up fundamentally to work with tightly defined graphical regimes. For the NES as an example, has almost zero ability to work with pixels or bits. It fundamentally at a hardware level deals with tiles. Sprite tiles are 8 by 8, or doublewide 8x16 if you put in some effort. You can build larger sprites by combining sprite tiles, but be careful because the hardware that processes this can only handle 8 sprites per scanline.

PC's have typically had a much more bitmapped graphical regime, where individual pixels are addressable and drawable, which better suits a general purpose computer but means you have to do some trickery if you want to get some of the polish that consoles had, and was typically slower since you didn't have dedicated hardware that spoke in those terms. on the flip side though setting up a windowing system on an NES with its hardware speaking in sprites and tiles would be a nightmare.

[shdon]

A nightmare, perhaps, but it has been done: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/nesos-somehow-fits-g...

[RuggedPineapple]

That is incredibly cool, but unless I'm mistaken it's not doing any windowing/arbitrary drawing. Everything is full screen, so elements can be plotted out in advance by the designer to work with sprite restrictions.