nesdev.com

Much better. Thanks.

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nesdoug.com -- blog/tutorial on programming for the NES

Palette generators should be able to produce even brightness and colour spacing, but once you're past that baseline and begin tweaking it by hand, at some level what you're doing is reverse-calibrating your personal combination of monitor + eyeballs. (This is perfectly okay to do, just there's a point where what you're doing doesn't even apply to other peoples' setup.)

You're welcome!
True. (And I agree on that last bit.) But I'm weird; I just don't trust the palette generators. xD The colors in my most recent post (excluding $0D, anyway…) came directly from the Control Deck that I own. Thus: I do trust those colors.

I dunno. ¯\(º_O)/¯ Like I said, I'm weird. (Plus, most — if not all — generators don't do the blacks correctly at all: tweaking the brightness in the generator does zilch to the blacks from what I remember, when it should definitely do at least something. (Though it's been a while since I last messed with a web-based palette generator.))

All this talk of palettes, and I was playing around with palettes today. I tried to make a decent Grayscale one, here's the results...

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nesdoug.com -- blog/tutorial on programming for the NES

And I made a Sepia Tone one, that I like a bit better...

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nesdoug.com -- blog/tutorial on programming for the NES

Here's the palettes, if anyone cares to try them out...

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nesdoug.com -- blog/tutorial on programming for the NES

I really like your sepia-tone palette, dougeff! It just needs some jumpy, old-timey film effects and piano music, and it'd be perfect.

I could sure do with some good straight, fully-desaturated grayscale graphics right about now, though. @_@ I foolishly stayed up all night messing about with making a screenshot gallery to show off my palette's colors in a few games… and then I added a few more games, and a few more, until I had screenshots from seventeen different games, all using my palette.

(That actually wasn't what I stayed up so late doing, though.)

Then a friend of mine suggested that I have some screenshots from other emulators and such to show off what the games look like in other emulators — for comparison.

And like a fool, I listened to him. |:

Seventeen games, displayed with eight different NES master palettes (including mine), with each set of screenshots on their own page! My eyes are so tired of colors that if they could, they'd scream. x_x

Of course, if I'd been able to get NESten to work on my laptop without encountering a Runtime Error, I'd have that one on there as well. Also LoopyNES and FWNES, but those're DOS-only, alas; they'll have to wait. (And if I weren't so tired, I'd right now be working on adding the 3DS and Wii/Wii U Virtual Console NES palettes that I heard someone ripped…)

Do you have to disable DEP/ASLR? Windows apps that use JIT and were produced before the introduction of those features might need DEP turned off.I remember NESten being an experiment in JIT recompiling 6502 code.


Do they work in DOSBox?

According to Wikipedia, .cx extension means Christmas Island, a small island West of Australia, population 2072 people. 60% of their economy from the mining of guano.

To clarify, Kizul's link above has a .cx web extension, which I found interesting.

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nesdoug.com -- blog/tutorial on programming for the NES

That's actually pretty fascinating. o.o I didn't think about the DEP messing things up.

But: ultimately, it doesn't matter, because I have an old machine laying around that I can use to run the old emulators; it has Windows 98 SE installed on it. :p I just hadn't wanted to bother with it at the time because I was very sleepy. XD

I appreciate the tips, however! I'll keep those in mind if I ever need 'em again.

…Also, in regard to DOSBox: I don't like DOSBox. Me and it… We don't get along. <_< That's actually a big part of the reason why I still have a Windows 98 machine.

…Though on the other hand, I might have to use DOSBox for loopynes in order to get a screenshot of it. I can't remember if it has a screenshot-saving function. ò.o It's been a good nearly-a-decade since I last used it. >.> We shall find out, though!


Yeah; my webspace exists on a server owned by my friend. I didn't know that about the .cx domain, though. o.O Interesting!

There was another infamous site on the .cx top-level domain that was very not safe for work. But let's not talk about that; just admire the facial hair of Spock's evil twin.

Just 1 little complaint, now that I've tested the Kizul Palette on a few games...

Maniac Mansion opening sequence (for some reason) is using $1d for black sometimes, and sometimes $3e, and sometimes $0d (around the words "Maniac Mansion" in the title screen). It just looks totally wrong with the Kizul Palette...

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nesdoug.com -- blog/tutorial on programming for the NES

Hm. Maniac Mansion is one game I've actually never played, so I didn't know about this. ò.O

I guess I could make one for Bee 52, and then change my main 'Definitive' one to have a $1D that's the same color as $xE/$xF.

Thank you for letting me know! I'll roll that change out between twelve and eighteen hours from now*, probably.

And in screenshot gallery-related news, I was able to get NESten, FWNES, and loopynes all working on my Windows 98 PC, and so now they have pages up on the screenshot gallery as of a few minutes ago. (Sadly FWNES, loopynes, BioNES, and FCEUX all look nearly identical to each other. xD)

Unfortunately, I did end up having to use DOSBox to get a screenshot of loopynes running rainwarrior's palette.nes, because while I managed to get it to run — I was correct that it didn't seem to have a screenshot-saving option.

Ah well! Now all I have left to add are just the Nintendo VC palettes, the Nestopia YUV "Consumer" palette, and maybe the palette of "REW", an interesting emulator that played Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and NES games. And possibly JNES in there somewhere.

*EDIT: aaaaaaand that's done now. I decided instead to make a separate palette for Maniac Mansion; it was simpler to create a single palette that would work better for (primarily) one single game.

I may look around my local used-games shops and see if I can get my hands on a copy of Maniac Mansion and rent it to see how it looks on my Control Deck; I'm curious how the blacks look on the real hardware. ò.O

Meanwhile, I may also end up rooting through almost the entire NES ROM set to see how games use which blacks and where; just in the few I was testing of the games I already own, I noticed that Dragon Warrior uses $0D for the mouths of Red Slimes, and $0E for the dragon silhouette on the title screen (as well as monster shadows). Meanwhile, Dragon Warrior III (and most other NES games, it would seem) uses just $0F for black, whilst Dragon Warrior IV uses $0F for black — except during battles, where it uses $3F. (Lunar Pool also uses $3F for its main black, but the glowing Cue Ball flashes to $0E when it turns black.)

This is maddening. But hey, at least some of us can agree: my palette looks a dang sight better than many other palettes out there! (Maybe not all of them, but a lot of them… In my opinion, at least…) It would seem that about the only major problems my palette has lie in (some of) the blacks!

EDIT 2: And, of course, because accidentally creating dead links all the time isn't enough, I ended up accidentally getting the two palettes switched around, so the special Maniac Mansion palette was still broken (technically). I just fixed it, though. >.>

EDIT 3: after much deliberation (and going through nearly the entire library of NTSC-U NES ROMs), I've decided to instead have a special palette for Bee 52, and rename the one that I'd made for Maniac Mansion so that the Maniac Mansion-specific palette is now the 'default' palette (and I've retroactively uploaded the Zip file into my older post). Apologies for the headaches, everyone. This will be my final edit, both to this post, and to this palette. :p

Something that has always seemed weird to me for as long as I've used NES emulators - was the sky in SMB1 and Zelda 2 really this purple?





I no longer have a real NES console or a CRT TV, so I can't check for myself. Assuming that this palette matches the behavior of correctly calibrated 1980s TVs, it strikes me as very strange that Nintendo chose such a purple hue ($22, I think) when $21 or $31 would look much better.

Yes.

There is of course variation between televisions (and don't forget that "tint" knob) but also perception of colour is somewhat relative as well as being driven by other external factors (e.g. like how you know it's "sky"). I don't think humans really have much ability to remember absolute colours with any kind of precision.

There's no way you could remember the exact hue of the SMB sky without having thought a lot about it and made direct comparisons with other potentials, etc., which is what you might be doing now that you're looking at palette possibilities. You need a framework of reference to be able to recall colours that way.