The 16-bit consoles, 1988 to 1996. The Super Famicom drew from a 15-bit master palette with 256 colours on screen, layered backgrounds and colour maths for translucency; the Mega Drive had nine-bit colour, 61 on screen, and no in-between tones. Both gave a sprite fifteen colours, enough for a tonal ramp per material.
Palette RAM and 64 kilobytes of video memory. The SNES's blending made pastel skies and fog cheap; the Mega Drive's three bits per channel made intermediate tones impossible, so its artists dithered, and the ordered-dither waterfall became a signature. The two machines share one sprite vocabulary and differ in colour depth.
The figure is rasterised at 256 by 224 and coloured from fifteen entries: four skins, four shirts, three trousers, three for hair and shoes, one outline, picked by face light. Three cached layers scroll at different speeds under a half-transparent fog band, the SNES side; a column of two blues in a two-by-two ordered dither is the Mega Drive side.