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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna

“Synthesis” NES palette

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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

NES color palette mister fpga emulation
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...

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 Emulator Palette File

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.

CRT Emulator Palette File

CRT Photoshop Swatches

nes color palette pixel art mister fpga emulation
pixeltao

The Infamous NES Palette

pixeltao

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:


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If you’d like to try it, you can download it here:

Raw palette version (for emulators)

Photoshop color swatches

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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:

Raw palette version (for emulators)

Photoshop color swatches

pixeltao

Version 2 available!

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nes color palette pixel art