Mario Maker Palette?

It occurred to me the other day that Mario Maker arguably has a palette that represents what Nintendo "intended". Certainly, it looks different to me than what a lot of emulators end up with. I was just curious if anyone had created a NES palette which reflects the colors seen in Mario Maker, and if so, do they look good for non-Mario games?

People have said that about the Virtual Console, the NES Classic, and so on, but none of these palettes are special in any way.

Well, I suppose that's true. However, I would consider them ever so slightly "special" in that SOMEONE at Nintendo considers them to be a good palette for what they want things to look like. Also unlike the Virtual Console and NES Classic which are emulators in their own right (and perhaps using palettes stolen from the open-source world), MM is a "from the ground up" recreation, which frankly... looks pretty good at least my eyes.

Mario maker also has added shadows for the sprites, which can't be done on a NES at all.

Indeed it has, but I don't think that has much to do with whether or not the palette they've chosen looks good...

That sounds really debatable. It probably is what they want the super mario series to look like, but that's as far as it goes.

I don't think there's any possible palette that represents what "Nintendo" intended. The colours used in Mario Maker represent what some art director who worked on Mario Maker intended, I suppose, but that's it. Nintendo isn't one immortal person that thinks only one way about a thing for 40 years. This is even before the fact that the colours will be slightly different on every TV or monitor you try it on.


Before you go down this route, realize that Mario Maker is not an emulator and it's not palette based, nor is it even pixel based. The colours chosen appear to be inspired by an NES style palette, but there is no constraint saying they have to be. Be prepared to find colours that don't fit the palette scheme, or are subtly mismatched, or get tinted in some areas/themes, etc...

But all that said, all you have to do is collect a bunch of screenshots and try to fit them onto the NES 64-colour grid. Personally I'd like to see the result of this, just out of curiosity, but not enough that I want to do it myself.

No debate there, I wasn't intending to imply that Nintendo is some monolithic immutable thought process.



Again, no disagreement here. Of course, it's not an emulator, but it is attempting to simulate the look and feel of the 8/16-bit era games. And I feel like they've done a pretty good job of it, even while adding subtle modern touches like shadows. I think the quirks that you mention are reasonably expected and could be dealt with pretty easily though, even if it means simply "making a choice" here and there.



That is pretty much my sentiment. I'd like to see how it looks! Maybe it would look great for Mario games, but garbage on others. Who knows. But I think that there's at least a reasonable chance that it would look pretty nice overall. The color choices they've made are very in line with what my fuzzy childhood recollection of these games are.

I read somewhere that the SMB game skin in Mario Maker 2 is consistent with the original game engine's color limitations, and this is why the airship scene skin has a lot of black (unlike the SMB3 one). Not sure if this is correct or why there would be such limitations, but if it is correct it sounds like they tried hard to limit colors (not counting the outline shadow) to the NES and even to the engine of the specific game for SMB and SMB3 game skins. It's possible things like the black airship are just arbitrary choices that they felt matched the SMB style though.

I agree that it would be interesting to see if they really did limited colors to the PPU's color generator in SMB and SMB3 game skins.