Another hurdle is the graphics hardware. The Game Boy uses a tile and sprite based approach, which is great for a wide variety of 2D games but becomes a major b

Another hurdle is the graphics hardware. The Game Boy uses a tile and sprite based approach, which is great for a wide variety of 2D games but becomes a major bottleneck when you want rendering at a lower level. Suddenly you don't only have to calculate the pixel color, you have to find its offset in the tile map and write it to the correct bits of the correct byte of the tile. The 256 color VGA frame buffer is perfect for this type of work because of the 1-1 relationship between bytes and pixels, and the simple correlation between memory offset and pixel position. So you have a slower CPU that's 8-bit (basically an 8080) rather than 16-bit doing more work because of the complex graphics model.