The bitboard approach is similar to how graphics cards used to organize their memory in the heyday. It wasn't one big buffer per screen with one or more consecu

The bitboard approach is similar to how graphics cards used to organize their memory in the heyday. It wasn't one big buffer per screen with one or more consecutive bytes representing on pixel and one pixel after another. There were as many buffers as required by the bit depth, e.g. one for black and white, two for 4-colors and so on. Every bit was a pixel, so the top left corner was the MSB of the first byte of any buffer. We called this bitplanes.