> Some of the colors used here don’t exist in the NES palette — for example, the NES cannot display bright yellow

Yes it can: 0x37 (https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/PPU_palettes).

Plus there isn't any bright yellow in NES.css; there's an orange / yellow colour that I agree isn't precisely matched in the NES colour palette but the other colours aren't a million miles away.

The other thing people forget when talking about retro systems is the colours they could display were greater than the sum of colours the chipsets could output because RF and CRTs created so much dither that the artists would place different coloured pixels adjacent to each other to blend new colours and add transparencies.

> The NES does not at all look “vibrant” or “crisp”, especially after all the artifacts from its cheap analog video generator.

You're right that no system of that era looked crisp (they definitely looked vibrant though! Especially if you cranked the brightness and contrast up on your TV) but the analogue video generator wasn't the real issue. It's pushing a signal out via RF and into a CRT TV that caused most of the dithering. And actually these days you can get a crisp RGB signal out of a NES if you wanted (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rgb+nes+mod, emulation, or just using a modern LCD as your display instead of an 80s era TV).

> Yes, but (unless you want to do some really awkward tricks) the characters must be aligned to an 8x8-pixel grid. The text in this page is ~9x12 or something like that (including spacing), and the alignment is not consistent throughout the page.

You can hardly blame the alignment issues when web sites aren't rendered using cell positioning. I do take your point about type face's pixel grid though.

> However, it’s also true that the NES (like every console of that era) had its own distinctive look-and-feel beyond just “big pixels”.

Yes and no. That's such a loaded statement that on the surface appears true but really isn't once you dig deeper.

First off lets dismiss the slew of 8-bit micros (Amstrad, Commodore, Dragon, Sinclair, Acorn, etc) those definitely had distinct characteristics, but they were also massively more limited systems.

Since we're talking 8-bit, I'm going to assume 16-bit consoles aren't part of the comparison as well.

In fact let's be fair and just compare the NES to other systems of the same generation: Sega SG100, Sega Master System / Mark III, Atari 7800 and of course the NES / Famicom (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_generation_of_video_game...). Games from that era follow similar tropes: for example chequerboard patterns used to give the illusion of speed (as seen in Sega's Space Harrier and countless Space Harrier clones ported to the Famicom). A casual observer could easily mistake Final Fantasy (NES) and Phantasy Star (Master System) games for one another.

Take hardware, the colour pallets between 3rd generation console (SG-1000 aside as that was very early 3rd gen) are largely. Similar enough where the dithering tricks I described earlier could make up the difference (the difference between the 4th gen colour pallets was massive though). Sound wise, the NES had the superior processing chip of the generation but even here, that was entirely down to the developers taking advantage of that and not being imaginative with it's counterparts (which isn't the case since there's a slew of SMS games with awesome sound tracks). Also both the NES and SMS had FM models too.

The 4th generation systems (SNES, Genesis, etc) all had their own distinctive feel. As did the 2nd gen. But the NES did have similar counterparts in the 3rd gen.

(If you can't already tell, I'm still heavily involved in retro systems...repairing, playing, developing)