What made the NES so interesting?
There were so many things the NES did right.<p>For instance the color palette was designed with aesthetics in mind:  it had 56 colors that you&#x27;d want to use,  compared to the 216 colors of the web safe palette that must have been chosen by a physicist because 60% of them make me want to puke.<p>The Atari 400 and 800 had an elaborate system for game-friendly video that couldn&#x27;t touch what the NES did with tiles.  They did amazing things with the TI-99&#x2F;4A (like simulate framebuffer graphics with tiles so long as you didn&#x27;t need to cover the whole screen...  a trick you couldn&#x27;t do with the character ROM talked about in this article) but it didn&#x27;t have the brilliant end-to-end engineering of the NES...<p>... And of course the ability to extend the hardware with the cartridge took advantage of the falling cost of electronics AND fit with the business model that the cheap console is subsidized by expensive games.