New NESRGB Firmware Featuring RGBSource Color Palettes

If you enjoy using my NESCAP, HYBRID, and/or NESCLASSIC color palettes, you now have the option of doing so on Tim Worthington's NESRGB! Two firmware (.pof file) options are now available.

palette1:
1. NESCAP
2. HYBRID
3. NESCLASSIC
Download palettes1_NESCAP_HYBRID_NESCLASSIC.pof

palette2:
1. NESCAP
2. HYBRID
3. FCEUX (aka "Improved" - default firmware palette 2)
Download palettes2_NESCAP_HYBRID_FCEUX.pof

NES "Hybrid" Palette - Striking a Balance Between Composite and RGB

After "accurately" capturing the NES composite video signal and creating a palette, I felt that the resulting image could use some seasoning of sorts.  While I enjoy the FCEUX palette, it can be a little too vibrant with a number of titles in the NES library.  I took the opportunity to create a "Hybrid" palette - an interpolation between my NESCAP and the FCEUX palettes.  The results of this palette give a best of both worlds colors.  Even the purple-ish sky in Super Mario Bros. retains some of it's purple-ish without going too deep into saturated sky blue.  Keep in mind that the color temperature and other settings on your display heavily influence the perceived color as well as the viewer's vision system (eyes and brains!).

If you'd like to try my HYBRID palette, you can download it here.

If you'd like to try my NESCAP palette, you can download it here.

The following images have NESCAP on the left, HYBRID in the middle, and FCEUX on the right.

Creating an "accurate" NES NTSC Color Palette - Revisited

After discussing my NES palette capture pursuits with Brian Parker (RetroUSB) at PRGE 2016 I decided to revisit the sampling process of the paltest palette capture images.  Instead of running multiple median filter passes to normalize the captured image for sampling, it was discussed to try taking an area of pixel values and averaging them.

If you'd like to try my NESCAP palette, you can download it here.

The following is a debug image that plots out the pixels I sampled for the average.  This was useful for ensuring that I wasn't sampling erroneous data and/or sampling unintended colors.

The resulting palette, NESCAP.pal, was within +/- 1% difference, so the original NTSCU.pal still is a valid palette to use, but there's always the nth degree of improvement to be made as seen below!

Wrapping up an Atari 2600RGB Install

Shortly after Tim Worthington released his 2600RGB kit this year I was chomping at the bit to install one as it is the first any only solution for obtaining RGB output from the Atari 2600!  While the Atari 2600 was my introduction to video games, any nostalgia I had for the console had always been hampered by its awful RF only output, full of noise in both the picture and sound.  A little over a decade ago I discovered some folks had created composite and S-Video mods, but they varied in picture quality and none stood out as being an ideal solution for the Atari 2600.

After acquiring an Atari 2600 to install the 2600RGB kit I was surprised by the extreme level of picture and audio noise when connecting the system to my HDTV using the stock RF switch output!  Thankfully the 2600RGB clears things up in both picture and sound departments.

I installed the kit in a "heavy sixer" several months ago, but hadn't finalized the output wiring until today!  This was in part due to the metal casing that surrounds the main circuit board.  Tim's installation guide for this particular revision of the Atari 2600 suggests using small wires to run underneath the metal casing, but I decided to take another approach!

2600RGB kit installed, but in need of output re-wiring.