I’ve decided to share the game engine I wrote in C# with XNA from back when I wanted to port Ninja Senki to XBox 360. Feel free to use it! https://pixeltao.itch.io/pixeltaoengine
Setting out on a quest to find a faithful NES palette is a first step towards madness. Because the NES used YIQ color color space rather than RGB there’s no such thing as an official NES palette (except maybe the PlayChoice-10 palette which looks nothing like what you get on a NES hooked up to a CRT TV). In addition to that, different brands/models of CRT TVs would decode the YIQ signal differently from one another. Consequently, NES palettes you can find on the internet are either arbitrary artistic representations or have been generated using some color space conversion algorithm.
Even though there are already many great NES palettes available (like the Unsaturated-V6), I could never find one that could reproduce the vivid colors of my own CRT TV (a slick 27-inch JVC TV). So I took the “artistic“ approach to create one using my Asus tablet with my CRT TV side by side. I sampled 50+ NES games and methodically set each color of the palette manually in Nestopia. The downside of this method is that monitor calibration can affect the result, but after testing it on a few different monitors, I’m pretty happy with it:
If you’d like to try it, you can download it here:
Raw palette version (for emulators)
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UPDATE:
After a week of testing various games, I’ve decided to go back and make some improvements to my NES palette. This time, in order to get an even more accurate result, I used an EverDrive (generously lent by Michael Larouche, in support for my palette related obsession issues). I ran the “Palette Test by Loopy” rom on my Famicom hooked up to my CRT TV and I compared the colors with 2 different LCDs running the same palette rom through Nestopia. This allowed me to carefully balance all colors with one another. Here’s a summary of the improvements I’ve made:
- Adjusted hues of the greens and purples.
- Balanced brightness of all colors.
- Added missing dark gray (not used in any of the games I sampled).
- No pure white (NES white appears to be slightly gray).
Colors of this palette are balanced with one another, but I’ve notice that they may appear off on some LCD screens because of color temperature settings. So, for example, if colors appear too bright or seem to be shifted towards blue or red, you can easily fix this by adjusting color temperature or changing the picture mode (”cinema”, for example) of your LCD screen.
Here are the download links for pixeltaoNES palette version 2:
