NES with color Palettes of different systems

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Sik
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Re: NES with color Palettes of different systems

Post by Sik »

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.
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Re: NES with color Palettes of different systems

Post by lidnariq »

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.
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Re: NES with color Palettes of different systems

Post by tepples »

psycopathicteen wrote:We need the "Micheal Bay" version of the NES color palette.
You mean the blue and orange version where everything is rounded to $0F, $x0, $x1, or $x7?
orange and teal.png
orange and teal.png (2.09 KiB) Viewed 16843 times
lidnariq wrote: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)
On EGA, the unbrightened colors normally map to 67%.
lidnariq wrote:Scanline doubling is available on the EGA: a weird 320x175 mode could have been made, but I've never seen anyone do it
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.
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BioMechanical Dude
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Re: NES with color Palettes of different systems

Post by BioMechanical Dude »

lidnariq wrote: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.
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.
Sik wrote: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).
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.
tepples wrote:
psycopathicteen wrote:We need the "Micheal Bay" version of the NES color palette.
You mean the blue and orange version where everything is rounded to $0F, $x0, $x1, or $x7?
That's a strangely badass palette. :lol: Also, somewhat uninspired. (Like Michael Bay and his movies.) Maybe it's because of the title. I've gotta try using it. :lol:
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Re: NES with color Palettes of different systems

Post by Sik »

lidnariq wrote: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.
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)
lidnariq wrote: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.
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).
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BioMechanical Dude
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Re: NES with color Palettes of different systems

Post by BioMechanical Dude »

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

Original NES Palette:
Image

NES-EGA Palette:
Image

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:

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

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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.

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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.

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"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.

Image

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

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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.

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

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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.
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EGA-Color Ramps.rar
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tokumaru
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Re: NES with color Palettes of different systems

Post by tokumaru »

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.
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Re: NES with color Palettes of different systems

Post by BioMechanical Dude »

I agree. There were however some EGA games, that knew how to use the colors properly and, in result look fantastic. :D 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.
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Re: NES with color Palettes of different systems

Post by rainwarrior »

Looking at those EGA shots I can hear the Model M keyboard clicking away in my mind.
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Re: NES with color Palettes of different systems

Post by Grapeshot »

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)

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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.)
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halfnes teal and orange.rar
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Sik
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Re: NES with color Palettes of different systems

Post by Sik »

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.
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Re: NES with color Palettes of different systems

Post by BioMechanical Dude »

Grapeshot wrote: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)
Damn! You beat me to it! :lol:
Sik wrote: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.
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.
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dougeff
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Re: NES with color Palettes of different systems

Post by dougeff »

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. :wink:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of ... e_palettes
nesdoug.com -- blog/tutorial on programming for the NES
Highway Guy
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Re: NES with color Palettes of different systems

Post by Highway Guy »

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 ;)
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Re: NES with color Palettes of different systems

Post by Myask »

dougeff wrote: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. :wink:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of ... e_palettes
Like a challenge you've issued, in fact.
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