How did older games do collision detection with walls, floors and ceilings?

For the types of NES-era games you're talking about, everything was 2D. That alone simplifies many things.

For games such as Super Mario World (SNES), the game stored the levels in a memory format that made it easy to take Mario's X/Y location, convert it to a tile address, and then check the tiles immediately around that address. Since the levels were always a fixed width (though the area you could view varied), it made addressing easier to manage since it was always a fixed offset from mario's position, e.g. Address + 1 for the tile beside mario, Address + 0x300 for the tile below him, etc.

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