"NTSC: Never The Same Color." Unlike most other consoles, the NES doesn't generate an RGB signal and then encode it to composite. It generates the signal directly in the composite domain, producing a color space that's essentially a 12-sided HSV cylinder embedded in YUV space. There's a standard translation of this NTSC signal to RGB values, but that doesn't produce exactly the same colors you see on your own TV for several reasons:
- Some of the colors that the NES generates, especially the darkest browns near $07 and brightest blues near $31, are actually outside the RGB color cube, with components less than 0% or greater than 100%. TVs interpret these differently.
- TVs aren't adjusted the same way.
- Different TVs have different primaries that imply different white points.
- TVs perform proprietary enhancements on skin tones.
- Pixels aren't Edges between different colored areas can be distorted, and some games use these "artifact colors" to add texture on the NES that doesn't show up on an RGB system such as a PlayChoice or Sharp Famicom TV.
In any case, for my own projects, I use a
palette generated with
Bisqwit's palette tool. I think the settings I used were hue +0, saturation 1.2, contrast 1.0, brightness 1.0, gamma 2.0.
If you're curious about the why, start
here and read the next few posts.