Different colors with Nes color palette

[kloworks]

Hi,
I was looking to study about Nes style but when I import sprite games at aseprite. Its not match with color palette. is there a reason ? or is there an option to tweak ?

Thanks

[Olga_Galvanova]

oh no, be careful, it’s a trap!
tldr: if you want same colours, make sure you use same palette as emulator does.

i’m no expert on retro computing and there are several possible explanations, but the main one would be that it’s a common thing in a world of emulation. i learned about this problem accidentally, only in my case it was when looking into sega console palettes.

what i’ve found is that it’s not as straightforward as i thought and some people invest a lot of time into researching the best possible colours for emulation.
since the image was displayed on crt, there’s no hex colour representation, it’s not our usual digital signal, not to mention that there might be differences between devices themselves. or in measurements, or something else…
that however means, that there is no single true palette, only different approximations, some claim to be closer to the real thing than the others.
then there’s also a search for the holy grail of palettes, the one which looks as close to crt colours as possible on digital screens.
in short: it’s a deep, deep rabbit hole.

and not surprisingly, above is true for NES community too. i made a quick google search and landed on this site:
http://www.firebrandx.com/nespalette.html
there are four nes palettes just on that page alone: the main one, the one for digital as close to crt as possible, then there’s one which is direct capture of composite output and finally ‘the bit perfect’ palette.

now, when i check in aseprite, there are already two nes palettes: nes and nes ntsc.
(i completely forgot there might be differences between pal and ntsc)
so, i’d assume that to get the same colours, you’d need to find out what palette your emulator uses and load that one into aseprite.

[kloworks]

Interesting! I didn’t know this was going to be such a big thing.
I think, in the end, it’s about choosing the colors that suit your game.
I read about “Shovel Knight” it uses NES-style colors but tweaks them a bit.

Thanks for all the info! I’ll do more research on this.

[divoomgirl]

More explanation:

Wavebeam NES Palette