A 1989 handheld: 160 by 144 pixels, eight-by-eight tiles, two bits per pixel, so four shades, on a reflective green-tinted LCD with no backlight. Sprites got three shades plus transparent. The passive screen smeared anything that moved.
Four shades was all the display could resolve, and the green was the LCD's native tint. The famous set of four greens is a fan convention, not a Nintendo specification. Artists faked a fifth shade with a checkerboard dither, which is why so much of that era looks woven.
A hundred-pixel offscreen canvas is drawn with single-pixel rectangles and scaled up with smoothing off. A checker dither by position fakes the in-between shade, and the lettering is the engine's three-by-five bitmap font. The jump snaps between four frames instead of tweening, sprite timing.