Your favorite NES palette?

LeftEmpty
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Re: Your favorite NES palette?

Unread post by LeftEmpty »

I use bright colours: most of the emulators had a tendancy to got for washed out colours for a long time, while the original Japanese Famicom I played on had distinctively very, very bright colours.
I'm personally using one of Wavebeam's, which fits my souvenir on my current TV.
And also using a "compositer" to make it all look jagged and blurry (and awful to most people, I gather) when I need the real old blast ;D
elvis
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Re: Your favorite NES palette?

Unread post by elvis »

elvis wrote: Tue Nov 17, 2020 10:00 amI've got to re-do the testing via a DAC
And I'm done. Results are here:
https://stickfreaks.com/colour/nes-colo ... omparisons
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ioev
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Re: Your favorite NES palette?

Unread post by ioev »

Just gonna chime in here with this:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/nes-composite-45695288

.pal files are not supported on the NES core are they?
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jlancaster86
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Re: Your favorite NES palette?

Unread post by jlancaster86 »

ioev wrote: Sat Jan 02, 2021 6:24 am Just gonna chime in here with this:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/nes-composite-45695288

.pal files are not supported on the NES core are they?
You can set a custom .pal file by renaming it to "boot3.rom" and setting the palette option to "custom": https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/NES_MiSTer
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SegaSnatcher
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Re: Your favorite NES palette?

Unread post by SegaSnatcher »

ioev wrote: Sat Jan 02, 2021 6:24 am Just gonna chime in here with this:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/nes-composite-45695288

.pal files are not supported on the NES core are they?
Of course they are, that is what the custom palette setting loads in. Just put your palette folder in the NES core folder.
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Re: Your favorite NES palette?

Unread post by barfood »

Thanks for your efforts, elvis!

So if I understand your results right, the "NES classic" palette is the closest to matching the AV Famicom? If so, that's very interesting, I never gave too much thought to the NES classic palette since it wasn't made by a community member. :)
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Re: Your favorite NES palette?

Unread post by elvis »

barfood wrote: Sat Jan 09, 2021 6:39 pm Thanks for your efforts, elvis!
No problems, glad to be able to contribute in my own small way.
barfood wrote: Sat Jan 09, 2021 6:39 pmSo if I understand your results right, the "NES classic" palette is the closest to matching the AV Famicom?
I must stress that it's almost impossible to determine a "best" palette, due entirely to the huge amount of variability involved. The NES spits out signals that didn't perfectly match any broadcast standard old or new, and the resulting images seen by the viewer are dependent on NTSC and PAL decoding chips and circuits in an era where "standards" either didn't exist, or were considered entirely optional by display manufacturers.

Since the late 80s things have gotten a lot better when it comes to colour science and colour standards. But in the early days of the NES, it really was the wild west, both on Nintendo's hardware and on display technology.

With all that in mind, using my very old PVM D20L5A which very likely has fading phosphors and capacitors in need of replacing, and when it was calibrated as close as possible to Rec601 standards, the MiSTer FPGA + NES Classic palette measured with the lowest Delta E 2000 (objectively measured level of error with respect to human colour perception using a colorimeter) compared to my also aging AV Famicom, also with aging capacitors. That is, objectively, the only thing I can say without bias.

What I do want to do is repeat the entire test on other displays to see if the outcome is similar. That means various domestic CRTs with newer circuitry (I've got some post-2000 model CRTs I can test), as well as using known trusted devices like Mike Chi's RetroTink (as I know Mike uses the Rec601 colour space in all of his hardware) onto a screen I trust, such as a calibrated LG OLED. But again, none of that will allow me to say what is the "best" palette, again due to a complete lack of standards of the era.
barfood wrote: Sat Jan 09, 2021 6:39 pm I never gave too much thought to the NES classic palette since it wasn't made by a community member. :)
To my knowledge the NES Classic palette was digitally ripped from Nintendo's platform by FirebrandX:
http://www.firebrandx.com/nespalette.html

I don't know anything about Nintendo's development methods (they're an extremely secretive company), but subjectively speaking I've always been impressed at their commitment to maintain a certain level of consistency when it comes to the look and feel of their old software. Doing things like re-timing PAL versions of their popular games so gameplay and audio don't suffer (NTSC Super Mario Bros and PAL Super Mario Bros are *much* closer than NTSC/PAL Sonic The Hedgehog, for example), or putting incredible effort in to in-house written emulators, whether that was emulating N64 Ocarina of Time on the GameCube for the re-release, or the colour palettes of the NES on the Wii Virtual Console.

I was pleasantly surprised by what I discovered when I did this experiment. I didn't go into it with any preconceptions (I literally started the project to answer the question for myself, instead of going by hearsay on the Internet). But as above, I still want to repeat the experiment several more times to see how different the results will be on different hardware outside of just a single PVM, which can't objectively be considered the source of truth.
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