Sometimes - but sometimes, it's also surprising how close to modern devices they were. Remember the Nintendo DS? It used two ARM cores and a 3.7V LiPo battery.

Sometimes - but sometimes, it's also surprising how close to modern devices they were. Remember the Nintendo DS? It used two ARM cores and a 3.7V LiPo battery. And those cheap 'Arduino'-compatible LCDs all have ASICs in them to drive the displays and expose the display RAM over a common communication interface. The actual display drivers support SPI/I2C as a convenience, for fast stuff they have parallel interfaces similar to actual HD 24-bit RGB displys.