#Concole color palette converter series#

This ensures you’re not suffering issues where colour information is being lost because brightness, contrast or colour settings are set too high or too low, and ensures a standard is being met that is far more accurate than calibrating by eye.

#Concole color palette converter series#

I’d previously begun a video series detailing how retro gamers can use inexpensive but still good quality calibration equipment to ensure their video displays, whether they be CRT, LCD or OLED, accurately show colours as intended by the various broadcast video standards. There’s always debate within the retro community over what is the “best” palette to use, however it’s important to emphasise that there is no true “best”, due to all of the issues mentioned. However due to all of the problems mentioned above, the colour palette of the Nintendo NES is statically represented as a best-effort attempt to match the original Nintendo NES as it was seen by the viewer. The Nintendo NES has seen a huge variety of community and commercial video mods, emulators, and more recently FPGA implementations that all offer RGB video out (or similar high end colour spaces for digital out over DVI or HDMI) for crystal clear video. In addition, the NES generated video levels internally that, for some colours, were slightly above the agreed specification for composite video, which meant that some of the colours fell into an area not defined by any television or broadcast standard, resulting in different clamping levels per display.Īdd to this the enormous variability of consumer television accuracy that existed in the mid 1980s, as well as slight modifications in board and PPU revision across the various hardware revisions of the Famicom and NES, and the result is that defining the actual colours seen on screen when playing an Nintendo NES game is almost impossible. While in theory we should be able to map these values directly to the RGB colourspace, in reality there are a number of issues related to the properties of CMOS electrical characteristics (how voltages rise and fall within the physical chip), and the electrical interference or “noise” this produces. Instead, the NES generated its video internally, within its PPU (Picture Processing Unit), directly in the composite video domain. Most other retro video game systems generated colour information internally (and often externally) in a combination of well defined red, green and blue values and then later combine or converted them into various broadcast signals like composite video, S-Video, component YPbPr (or just amplified and coupled appropriately for RGB over SCART). The Nintendo NES was a strange beast when it came to how it generated a video signal.