If this is an artificial limitation, are the hardware screens just normal, mini TV-grade screens? As in, without the rest of the components, I could just plug Netflix into it? (kinda joking here, but seriously, what is the true limit to these screens, if we didn’t use this limitation) Also, on another post, @richard (I think it was Richard) said there was a browser/app-exclusive mouse and keyboard support in development. If we could have this sort of feature, could we have a browser-only multi-colour support too? Perhaps this and the keyboard thing could also work on retropi if you figured out how (well, keyboard does work to an extent on raspberry as a controller, nothing more).
Sorry for the long post and I went far too off topic here at the end…
I believe for the Adafruit PyGamer, it uses the ST7735R TFT driver, which has 16 bit colors. I think it would be a reasonable assumption that the rest of the devices Arcade support has 16 bit color support in hardware.
well, no, not technically. The black is the default color for transparent with nothing behind it; in other words the transparent IS black, and black IS transparent.
If you have 2 sprites on top of each other, there kind of is transparent. You could also keep an array of all the images so that you can loop through the array and set a pixel to transparent at the same spot related to the screen to get black at that pixel. So there is transparent and black.