Retron HD NES Color Palette Extracted - Gawkers Beware!

The recent flood of low quality NES consoles has made me curious to see how they look and perform. I picked up a Retron HD at Hyperkin's PAX 2017 booth and was most curious to see what the color palette looked like. Not to my surprise, it looked a little... off.

SNES Classic Edition - Observations and Captures

After the wildly popular NES Classic from 2016 Nintendo has followed up with the release of the SNES Classic. While there are many outlets covering this exciting new device (and how it's essentially the same HW as the NES Classic), I'd like take the opportunity to cover a few particular points of interest.

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

Retroactive's New 64drive HW2 - Now You're Playing with Ultra Power!

Retroactive recently began shipping their completely redesigned 64drive. It offers a solid alternative to the Everdrive 64 and provides a number of special development oriented features. The new HW2 features an Altera Cyclone IV FPGA and retires the Compact Flash (CF) interface in favor of a discretely positioned micro SD card slot and USB interface for N64 game development.

NES Classic Palette "Beta" - Sifting Through the Noise

Without further ado, here is my capture based extraction of the NES color palette used by the new NES Classic! Nintendo added a surprising feature - subtle active "noise" throughout the picture. I surmise this was to give a "magic" texture to the image for games with large flat fields of colors. See the following image capture with zoomed in snippet to observe the noise.

UPDATE: Release version of the NESCLASSIC.pal can be found here.

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

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!