GameBoy Palette Survey

Features
1

Hi everyone,

While I was testing out some grayscale / monochromatic stuff, I had issues with the default Aseprite GameBoy palette. So I made a survey of GameBoy palettes I could find around the internet.

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Here are my sources:

  1. Wikipedia
  2. Yuragi Channel
  3. Andrade
  4. Kirokaze
  5. Greer
  6. BGB Emulator
  7. Link’s Awakening (SGB)
  8. Arne

All palettes contain 4 colors originally. The ramps above were generated by linear interpolation in RGB.

Here’s the same image, but in grayscale (created with Aseprite’s to grayscale conversion).

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There is typically more variation in luminance between the third and fourth colors, counting from left to right.

For science, I took a “wisdom of the crowd” approach and averaged the palettes together in HSL, except for Aseprite’s. Then I converted to RGB. Here’s what the computer spat back out:

H 135.83983
S 51.03161
L 16.397058
#143f20

H 122.7701
S 38.075405
L 34.852947
#377b3a

H 88.59005
S 49.863308
L 55.56373
#90c655

H 84.023544
S 71.35483
L 78.77451
#d1efa2

I’m kidding, I realize that’s neither a great way to analyze nor create a palette. But if anyone has any recommendations for other classic GB palettes, feel free.

Jeremy

2

well, it depends on what’s your goal. none of them is technically correct :]]
for development, requirements of specific tool are more important and for looks it’s kinda free for all.
for example gbstudio requires #e0f8cf #86c06c #306850 #071821 and #65ff00 for transparency. and because you can change those colours, four games showcased on front page use three different palettes :]]
i’d say wikipedia and aseprite are probably close to brand new real life display, but i prefer arne’s palette - it has warm, dull, worn out look i like.

i know that some people went so far they actually measured signal output on their devices, but those were sega consoles. i don’t know if anyone did something like that with gameboy. there’s so many variables: adjustable brightness, age, different displays, gb pocket (greyscale), gb light (grayscale with backlight) etc.

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The GameBoy was… pretty bad at colour, and I think the Aseprite and Yuragi palettes communicate that and how uneven the value scale was pretty well.

It’s generally not a general-purpose palette and is best-suited for previewing work meant for real hardware to get a sense of readability. For making GB-esque work, I do think a different palette is best. I rather like the BGB palette for that, and the one that GB Studio uses is pretty nice.

Edit: @Olga_Galvanova You left out the part where the original GameBoy, lacking a backlight, so strongly depended on the external light source for how its colours looked ;D

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:]] yeah, i doubt it is possible to simulate how gb palette looked on real device.