When you can’t choose, why not pick them all? Here’s Synthesis, a palette that combines my previous Pixeltao CRT palette with Nestopia YUV, Sony CXA, Wavebeam and Magnum (FBX).
Emulator palette:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lucFxgSSNY0ttSqmJ0uukzNK89SLSPDA/view?usp=sharing
Photoshop Swatches:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/19gPN_ao7lFqBnimPrqwlhBUXVFdK32K2/view?usp=sharing
Here’s a new NES palette created for CRTs in mind. “Pixeltao CRT” is based on my 2016 V2 palette, which was based on the colors I’d get on a 2006 JVC CRT TV.
In a nutshell: both palettes aren’t scientific recreation of the original NES composite signal. Instead, they’re balanced to have an optimal hue distribution. For example, with the original composite signal of the NES, you get greenish yellows and purplish blues. The palettes shared here rebalance these hues with warmer yellows and oranges and a tad less purple in the blue rows.
PixeltaoV2 (2016)
This palette was made in 2016. It features strong vivid colors, excellent for NES-style pixel art, but might come out too saturated on a CRT. It’s the palette we used for the graphics of Panzer Paladin on Steam and Nintendo Switch.
V2 Photoshop Swatches
Pixeltao CRT (2021)
I developed this new palette based on V2, specially for CRTs. The saturation has been toned down a notch and some lightness adjustments were made. It’s pretty close to Nestopia YUV in terms of lightness and saturation, but it retains the hue distribution of V2. It looks great when used with the NES core of MiSTer FPGA on a CRT.
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:
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:
Version 2 available!
Even though I was taking care of the game design on Scott Pilgrim, I still did a bit of pixel art: like these tiny versions of the characters for the world map.
The character line up I did on Wizorb. I created each sprite in front view and then Paul Robertson animated them.
Ninja Senki was the first indie title I released back in 2010 before we founded Tribute Games. I made this game because I love Mega Man and Japanese culture… So, why not combine both! We just released a deluxe version of the game on Steam and PSN today to celebrate its 5th anniversary. Grab it for 5 bucks!
The process I went through when I made the illustration for Ninja Senki DX (which comes out tomorrow by the way!) I don’t do full color illustrations very often, so my process was kinda chaotic, but these 4 steps give a good idea of how it evolved from the first sketch to the end result.
We’re making some tiny graphical upgrades for Ninja Senki DX. Here’s a Sumo I made to replace the Mega Mushi in the later levels of the game.
I’ve been wanting to post this for ages. The new logo I designed for Ninja Senki DX. I’m currently working full time on this game!
