> If you're a carpentry shop that just bought power tools for the first time and you're worried that your employees are sticking with hand tools because that's what they know, then you look for sawdust.
Or count the fingers, I guess. It's all fun and games until someone looses AI.
Though the ancients did recognize as occult forces magnetism (Thales, according to Aristotle, gave the motive power of magnets as an example that even apparently inanimate objects have souls) and electricity (from triboelectic effects with amber, whence comes the name, and which Thales discussed as induced magnetism, also Plato mentions the stunning caused by electric rays), though it would be a while before the connection was made between these phenomena.
Pitch is the offset between the start of consecutive rows of pixels in the image, used to convert y coordinates into the start of any given row, so you access a pixel as buffer[y*pitch+x]. Often this is the image width, but can be greater depending on required alignment.
Some of my earliest programming exposure was a dBASE IV book my dad had for work, though it was some time before I put any of it into action. At that time I was reading manuals like fiction, only slowly realizing that I could actually use some of it with our computer.
> Or you do not consider MUL/DIV "arithmetic", or something.
Multiplier and divider are usually not considered part of the ALU, yes. Not uncommon for those to be shared between execution threads while there's an ALU for each.
Even on NES a lot of games use CHR-RAM so arbitrary bitmaps are at least possible, though only a small part of the screen is unique without some rarely used mapper hardware. Zelda and Metroid mostly just use this to compress the graphics in ROM, Qix is a simple example with line drawing, Elite is an extreme one.
I made a demo of the Mystify screensaver using the typical 8KB CHR-RAM. Even with a lot of compromises it has pretty large borders to avoid running out of unique tiles. https://youtube.com/watch?v=1_MymcLeew8
Or count the fingers, I guess. It's all fun and games until someone looses AI.