NES with color Palettes of different systems

Time for some pointlessness! So, I was messing around with an NES emulator and some color palettes I have and then I thought: "How would NES games look like with the 16-color Commodore 64 color palette? Or the EGA palette? So, I decided to adapt these colors in these palettes to the NES ones, as best as I could and make .pal or .act files, which you can use in FCEUX or any other emulator, that supports external palettes.
First is the C64 palette. At first, I was gonna just do a quick copy-paste operation and just put whatever "new" colors are similar to the original ones. But then I decided to make color ramps for all the hues, so that the shades look good. I'm glad, I made that decision, because the results are much better.

Original NES Palette:


NES-C64 Palette:


Speaking of the results, they are... interesting. Some games still look great, others don't. As you can see, C64 color palette uses very washed out colors and 3 shades of gray, and there are only 16 colors. This should create great limitations for the palette and it kinda does, but it also allows the user to easily create color ramps. So, even though it may not seem so, the graphics look quite similar to the original ones. Here are some screenshots of various games, so you can see what they look like.







"Castlevania II: Simon's Quest" used a lot of grays to create a washed out color palette. Now, with the C64 palette, there are even more grays! "Akumajou Densetsu"(Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse), on the other hand looks rather nice.



Some games kinda suffer from this new palette. The C64 palette has only one yellow color, so I had to put either light brown, light red or light green in a lot of places. Because of that, the yellow ranger in "Choujin Sentai Jetman" is now a green ranger.



I have to admit, "A Nightmare on Elm Street" looks amazing with this palette. "Shatterhand" also looks great, but it's probably because it has some of the best graphics, the NES could offer, in my opinion.



"Ninja Gaiden", on the other hand, wasn't converted well. We have a very grey-looking Ryu Hayabusa. Then again, he is a ninja, he is supposed to blend in with the environment.

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Some games really don't look good with this palette, though that may be, because of the graphics designers' color choices. "Devilman", for instance has incredibly bland graphics (especially considering it was made in 1989) and it suffers from the C64 color palette. It may not look so bad in the screenshots, but the enemies blend in with the background and it looks pretty bad. "G. I. Joe", on the other hand, looks pretty good.



"Double Dragon II and III" look pretty great, though there is color loss.





Now you may be wondering why I didn't show you the original "Super Mario Bros.", the game that started it all. Well... because it kinda looks like this:



As you can see, we have a gray sky and the green in Mario's sprites looks very bright. This was the darkest green color in the C64 palette, so it ended up using that one. As for the sky, one of the brightest colors in this palette is, you guessed it, a light gray. When making the color ramps, I had to use it for the brightest shades, with the exception of the warmer colors, where I put yellow, because it's bright and I wanted to avoid gray skin colors. "Super Mario Bros. 2" looks a bit better, but not much.



Finally, "Super Mario Bros. 3" looks really good, though, unfortunately, it still has gray skies.



I'll finish this with two NES classics.



Interesting how "Metroid" ended up using a lot of greens.

Anyway, that's it for now. I'll post the palette as an attachment and test out your favorite games yourselves! I'll be posting screenshots of games, using the CGA, EGA and Amstrad-CPC palettes.

Hey, it's a very interesting concept! I always tough the C64 palette was quite a limitation, but most games looks good that way (they still don't use C64 resolution or other limitations, though). The gray sky could be easily fixed by using a blue C64 colour instead of gray for that particular colour, but then it will be darker than what it is supposed to.

Might not be all that related, but why is Choujin Sentai Jetman's text in English? Isn't Super Sentai mostly just a Japanese thing?

As for the color palettes, to be honest I didn't even notice the difference with a quick scroll. The C64 now impresses me.

None of those screenshots could actually be rendered on the C64 - on the C64 each tile has either only 2 colours or 4 colours but shared by 2 consecutive horizontal pixels (effectively cutting the resolution in half).

The C64's screen has 40x25 tiles instead of 32x30 like NES. The C64's sprite capabilities are much inferior to NES's.

This is the actual title screen.

The title screen used above is from the fan translation by Mog House.



Here, it's called "Power Rangers".


I thought the same thing until I saw Mayhem in Monsterland. Let me explain in more detail: The VIC-II supports 8 sprites that can be moved mid-screen by a scanline IRQ handler. They are about as wide as 16 NES pixels but 21 lines tall. Each sprite has its own specific color. A hi-res sprite (24x21 pixels) can use only its own color and transparency. A multicolor sprite (12x21 double-wide pixels) can use three colors: the sprite's own color and two scene-wide colors for all multicolor sprites. Mayhem showed me the key trick that makes this roughly equivalent to NES capability: You can hide the effect of the double-wide pixels by overlaying a hi-res outline sprite on top of the multicolor sprite.


Mayhem in Monsterland (C64) uses the outline-plus-multicolor trick for Mayhem (the Bub lookalike) but not the Yoshis.

Yeah, I could tell something was up if the C64 could render those graphics yet never used them. XD



K then. Just pointed that out cuz I don't think Jetman ever got overseas to Power Rangers.

Some of those look good. Perhaps you should take PAL colour blending into account?

http://hitmen.c02.at/temp/palstuff/gallery1.html

From what I hear it almost became the first Power Rangers team (Saban started negotiating Jetman, it seems), but Zyuranger ended up being used instead.

Regarding palettes, it's impressive how some games still manage to look good even though the C64 palette is much smaller, and the same color ends up replacing many different NES colors.

At some point I tried the opposite of what's shown here... instead of mapping some other palette to the NES color space, I tried to map the NES colors into an RGB cube, so that I could use the same palette fading technique found in many Master System and Genesis games, where the color components are decremented separately one after the other. I couldn't do it though, even when I dedicated more than 2 bits for each component.

First of all, I'd like to thank you for all the replies. I didn't expect this to turn into a conversation about C64 graphics and Super Sentai.

Anyway, while the NES's graphics wouldn't look like that on the C64, because of color and resolution limitations, they might be more accurately portrayed on the PC, since CGA and EGA graphics support 320x200 resolutions. In this post, I'm gonna show you the CGA palette.

Original NES Palette:


NES-CGA Palette:


As you can see, this is an incredibly limited palette. It supports only 4 colors and though they can be changed, a lot of games used these colors. There are three shades: black, any of the two colors and white. The two colors both have the same saturation, so you can't use both of them to make shades of the same color. Most developers overcame this limitation, by using dithering, but this is a color palette and dithering's not supported. I thought this post would be a joke, but, surprisingly enough, a lot of games look kinda good. They don't look great, but you can tell what's going on and the graphics, for the most part, are aesthetically pleasing. Here are the screenshots:





If you're wondering, no, this is not the official family-friendly version of "Bionic Commando", this is the retranslation hack.



"Contra" doesn't look that great, but it definitely looks much better than the actual MS-DOS version. "Kickmaster" has some sprites blending with the background, but other than that, it looks really good.



"Devilman" still looks pretty bad. This time, the enemies don't blend with the background as much (at least not the ones, shown here), but Akira does, when he's in front of the brick buildings. It kinda reminds me of a ZX Spectrum game, because of that.
"Double Dragon II", on the other hand, looks pretty great.



"Clash at Demonhead" looks surprisingly amazing. Now, who wants an MS-DOS port with CGA graphics support?



"Street Fighter 2010" looks a little crowded, but, otherwise, it's fine.



"Arumana no Kiseki" definitely has suffered. The main character looks like he hasn't been colored. "Power Blade" looks pretty good.

Let's see if "Super Mario Bros." looks any good.



Oh, dear God!!! No!!! Well, it does look a bit better with the Fireflower. "Super Mario Bros. 2" again looks a bit better, but not that much.

Once again, I'm ending this with "Metroid" and "Mike Tyson's Punchout"



Again, I have posted the palette itself as an attachment, so you can use it on your own and experiment with different games. Next time, I'll show you the 16 color EGA palette.

CGA actually supports a surprising number of not-very-usefully different palettes:
- red, green, brown
- darker cyan, darker magenta, grey
- bright dilute red, bright dilute green, bright yellow
- bright cyan, bright magenta, bright white (the one you've demonstrated here)
- red, cyan, white
- bright dilute red, bright cyan, bright white

plus, you can change the 4th color to any one of the 16 intrinsics (not just black, as you have here).

(q.v. Wikipedia)

This is entirely ignoring artifact colors over the CGA's composite output.

The last two don't work on composite monitors nor on many CGA clones (nor any of the successors, either). Also the color of dark yellow depends entirely on the monitor (some output ochre, some output brown).

Normally I'd have just treated it like grayscale (with cyan as light gray and magenta as dark gray) but huh you're right it looks much better than it seemed.

The "canonical" demonstration of the CGA extra colors is California Games, which uses raster effects to change the exact drawn mode mid-frame:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/calif ... otId,7722/
It's using bright white-cyan-red on top and bright yellow-green-red on bottom.

Anyway, certainly Commander Keen and Avoid the Noid used the bright white-cyan-magenta mode. I found a video of a bunch of random CGA-era games—a pretty good demonstration of all six palettes. Almost none of them change black, though... Sierra's games like King's Quest may be the only ones to set it to blue to get RGB+yellow.

Most don't change black because otherwise you're left without a good dark color. The one at 4:06 does and... you can see the issue.

We need the "Micheal Bay" version of the NES color palette.

I agree, CGA looks surprisingly decent in most of your examples.

Oh by the way, since you'll do EGA next: remember to use the actual EGA palette and not the bastardized Windows one (the original palette is 2/3 for each RGB bit and 1/3 for the intensity bit, with the quirk of dark yellow having its green halved).

It'd also be interesting to see the difference between brown and dark yellow (i.e. with and without the green halving), although I wonder if it's worth having two sets of screenshots for only one different shade. The brightness difference may force rearranging colors all over the place though.

The Windows 3 VGA softpalette is: 3-bit RGB, all at 50% brightness, followed by 3-bit RGB all at 100% brightness. The exception is that "dark white" is instead #C0C0C0, and "bright black" is instead #808080.

Windows 3 on an EGA card can't do that; it only has a 6 bit (2 bits per channel) DAC. (in the monitor, in fact) ... but I can't find a reference of what values they use instead. (The only real question is whether the 50% brightness shades are 33% or instead 67%; the rest maps obviously)

Note: EGA has two different palettes. One's very similar to the SMS's palette, (any 16 colors out of a 64-color master palette) but only works in 350-scanline modes. (Scanline doubling is available on the EGA: a weird 320x175 mode could have been made, but I've never seen anyone do it). The other is identical to CGA's text mode (on the 5153 monitor) but only works in 200-scanline modes.

You mean the blue and orange version where everything is rounded to $0F, $x0, $x1, or $x7?



On EGA, the unbrightened colors normally map to 67%.


Once I did the equivalent of scanline tripling. I set up 350-line text mode with 3 lines per tile, giving 80x117 tile map. Then I used the half-and-half glyph to split each tile down the middle into two pixels, giving 160x117 very nearly square pixels. That's roughly in the same size class as Odyssey 2, Atari 2600 games with a 2-line kernel, Game (Boy|Gear), and Lynx.

On the other hand, if you set up the standard 43-line EGA text mode and fill it with colons, then you have both an 80x86 processor and an 80×86 grid of dots on the screen.

That's true. But, each of these palettes creates numerous possibilities of how the games will look with them and it would take too many screenshots to show off each one. I chose the black-magenta-cyan-white, because a huge number of games used that palette, so I thought it would be representative enough.


Don't worry. I never liked the Windows one myself. The colors are way too standardized, to even consider making color ramps for the NES palette. Also, EGA never used such a palette, unless you use 640x350 mode and change the colors, but there aren't any games, that I know of, that use that mode anyway.


That's a strangely badass palette. Also, somewhat uninspired. (Like Michael Bay and his movies.) Maybe it's because of the title. I've gotta try using it.

It just uses what's set by the hardware. Windows (in general) only attempts to modify the palette when there are 256 colors or more. (this means it also uses that EGA palette in the VGA mode, since 640×480 is only 16 colors there)


What people usually call the EGA palette is actually the CGA's master palette =P It's also the default in the modes where the palette isn't hardwired (remember it still can only show 16 colors).

Hey, guys! Sorry for the delay. Today, I'll show you the EGA color palette.

Original NES Palette:


NES-EGA Palette:


This palette had to go through a lot of fine-tuning. Since the colors are more defined, it's not easy to make color ramps. Unlike the Commodore 64 palette, where gray can often be used to "link" the colors in the ramps, here it's used rarely. I also had a lot of trouble with the warm colors, since yellow is one of the brightest colors in the palette and I wanted it to replace the skin colors, but then it became hard to find a color for the darkest shades and to have a unique color ramp for each hue. The result is not perfect, but I think, I kinda pulled it off. Anyway, here are the screenshots:











The Red Ranger in "Choujin Sentai Jetman" is now brown! Oh, well... The Yellow Ranger is now... yellow, which is good.



Interestingly enough, "Devilman" looks much better than with the previous palettes. Yes, the human characters have gray skin and Ryo Asuka's hair is white now, instead of blond, but other than that, the game looks fine. "G. I. Joe" also looks great, but that is to be expected.









Once again "A Nightmare on Elm Street" looks great, with the exception of the gray skin colors. "Ninja Gaiden" also looks a lot better, than it did with the C64 color palette.



"Snake's Revenge" ends up with a very gray jungle, but that's due to the fact, that dark gray is one of the darkest colors in the EGA palette.



Let's see how "Super Mario Bros." looks.



Well, we have a very brown-looking Mario. Having the Fireflower once again helps. "Super Mario Bros. 2" doesn't look as good, as I expected it would, but it's still not bad.



"Super Mario Bros. 3" is also fine, but we have a white sky.



So that was the NES-EGA color palette. It was definitely hard to adapt the NES colors, but in my opinion, the results are relatively good. Next time, I'll show you the Amstrad-CPC palette.

The results are surprisingly good! I feel like the games retained the "NES feel" much better than with the other palettes, but at the same time ended up looking much better than most real EGA games from back in the day. Maybe it's because most EGA artists didn't mix the colors much, but opted to stick with the obvious combinations. This is actually an insight on how we can improve our own NES art... instead of sticking to the obvious gradients, we should try shading, highlighting and dithering with non-obvious colors more often.

I agree. There were however some EGA games, that knew how to use the colors properly and, in result look fantastic. But, yeah, experimenting with colors and using different hues in one color ramp, can result in some great looking graphics. There were games, late in the NES's lifespan, that did this and pulled it off really well. "Kick Master" is one example, that comes to mind.

Looking at those EGA shots I can hear the Model M keyboard clicking away in my mind.

Here's what some games look like in Michael Bay vision (teal and orange, or NTSC decoded to YIQ with the Q component forced to zero)











And attached is the quick edited version of my emulator that I made these with.
(Turn the NTSC filter on in the settings since I didn't edit the normal palette.)

Street Fighter 2010 looks like it was made for it lol. Also the Megaman games look perfect.

I wonder how it'd have fared if it used the variant with dark yellow instead of brown (this would change the mappings noticeably I imagine). Also I'd have used dark red in place of dark gray for the darker green shades, but eh, that's just me.

Damn! You beat me to it!


Yes, it would change the mappings. Maybe I'll try adapting that palette in the future. About the green shades: red wouldn't work, because red and green compliment each other, so the dark red will stick out a lot, when put near the green colors and it wouldn't make a good color ramp. Dark blue could work, but I decided to go with grey, because it still makes a nice color ramp.

I noticed on the Wikipedia page of 'list of video game console palettes' it says they can't show an example of their colorful parrot with the NES palette, due to system constraints...that sounds like a challenge to me.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of ... e_palettes

I find it interesting that you chose Alien 3 as one of your examples for the C64 palette. Considering that game was created by a team of C64 devs

Like a challenge you've issued, in fact.

Like a challenge he would issue, actually, as you've quoted a post from July of 2015 and linked to one from seven months later.

I decided to give this concept a shot. The .pal files in the attached zip were generated using a CIEDE2000 color difference algorithm that compared Nestopia's YUV palette against palettes that I found in other emulators, on Wikipedia and other web sites. The monochrome palettes were generated by comparing normalized luminance components. The zip includes palettes for the following systems: Apple II, Atari 2600, CGA 1, CGA 2, ColecoVision, Commodore 64, Game Boy, Grayscale, Intellivision, Master System, Monochrome Amber, Monochrome Green, MSX and Tandy.

This technical approach is very interesting. In some cases the results are spectacular (Castlevania with the C64 palette, for instance)! In other cases, it's a bit disappointing (In Metroid, Samus is completely yellow with the Apple II palette). The good thing is that the color ramps could be more accurate in terms of lightness. The downside is that some of the color replacements simply don't work. But anyway, this is very cool!

I noticed similar issues with the algorithm, especially with the Tandy palette (EGA) since it does not contain unsaturated colors. The algorithm could be modified to optimize colors over a set of player sprites. I.e., given a large set of sprites, it could find the optimal colors that retain all their looks. And, after that, it would optimize the remaining colors.

I made 2 EGA palettes, the standard 16 color one used by Tandy graphics, and the full 64 color EGA palette.

• View image: Castlevania 3 with regular RGBI colors
• View image: Castlevania 3 with the full EGA palette

I modded the palette by making a screenshot of the palette editor in VirtuaNES and converting it to the EGA palette using GIMP. I did some fine tuning here and there though. Using the full EGA palette the games look almost like the real deal

[Edited markup to make viewing the images less confusing --MOD]

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