Color Palette Mockup

@Virgin Any update on this at all? We are using the same approach as Jan with some of our wireframes and a color picker embedded would improve our workflow. Right now we are using a separate app to match the colors and this seems like an unnecessary step.

Pro Palettes - Vol. 1 comes with a set of 20 bespoke color palettes. Each palette includes 5 base colors with 9 tints/shades for a total of 45 colors per palette. You will never run out of combinations.

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Working within tight restrictions is much of the fun for many people into making games (or graphical mockups) for older systems. Our minds seem like a good puzzle, and being efficient with pixels and data be satisfying in that way. But, I do really believe that restrictions can benefit you as an artist, at least when it comes to staying consistent within a certain graphical style. Keeping color count down and having a uniform palette is often a good idea even when you do traditional art, so I think old hardware limitations can align with that. I think I mention it in my unfinished pixel art tutorial.

As a graphics guy I feel that there's something missing between the NES and SNES*. NES sprites feel like they really could use two more colors or so, while SNES sprites tend to use muddy gradients and needless anti-aliasing because it's so tempting to use all the colors. This project aims to conjure up a of missing link of sorts, a NES 1.5.

*The SEGA Master System had something going with the total 16 BG + 16 FG colors. 16 colors is perhaps more than I would use per sprite, but because the palettes are shared between all sprites I probably wouldn't use more than 4-10 colors per sprite. This is not a SMS project though, so maybe another time. The PC Engine is another interesting system.

Many have suggested using FPGA for this project (for a mockup at least), but I haven't introduced myself to hardware programming. An alternative is running an emulated version in a cheap and speedy modern processor, but it feels a bit like going against the spirit of the project, too. For now I'm going to pretend that this thing is all ASICs, and design it from that perspective just for consistency. It feels the most real and interesting. I quite like the idea of discrete components and an FPGA/emulation doesn't really offer that. I don't mind using modern components if they match the specs though (like surface mount resistors, more space efficient RAM chips and a nice switched PSU).

As I understand it: A VGA RAMDAC has RAM memory inside so it can store an internal 256 color palette using RGB components. Those are sent their separate ways to three DACs and finally the VGA's R,G,B wires as 0 - 0.7 volt analog. The palette entries can be changed at certain times, but the chip has become a bit of a legacy mess and nowadays you don't see anything running in indexed mode other than emulated.

In the case of the Famicube I'd only connect six of the index pins because I have a 64 color palette. The rest of entries could be other useful palettes of mine, like the 16 color one, and my Workbench palette which is bit-plane collapsible. Ideally, the color entry layout should be so cleverly designed, that one can design a reasonable palette by swapping pin connections around (on a breadboard or whatever). Would be hard to cover all possible combinations though.

Here's an example to demonstrate the problem. In an idea scenario, the palettes should create a good 256 color palette together, but perhaps this would mean compromising the individual palettes which are more ultimately important. I the no-signal would be black as default, bot one could probably pull pins/bits high with some dummy signals.

I should probably arrange the palette so I have nice RGBCMY etc on the single pins for 1-bit color projects, but I suppose one could put a dummy signal on another pin and get a better selection. It becomes a lot more complicated once you combine pins, like pin 3, 7, 0 and a constant dummy signal on 2. Which 8 colors does that give? Preferably useful ones! Not every combination has to look good, but at least a few should, aside from my deliberate ones. I need to write a test program which connects pins and dummy pins randomly, spits out the resulting palettes, and if I don't like them I'll have to rearrange some indices.

This chip would be useful for Arduino projects where you might not have bandwidth to output separated R,G,B. 1-bit to 3-bit output seems to be pretty common, and people just hook the bits directly to the VGA's R,G,B pins and make terrible full-value palettes.

My emulator is not a full hardware emulator, but something which produces the same graphical result (tile storage, palettes and so forth) on a modern PC/Mac. I wouldn't know how to emulate an ASIC at gate level. I keep changing the storage format for the tiles around. Packed pixels (e.g. storing eight 3-bit pixels as 00011122 23334445 55666777) is nice in my software (easy to mask and shift out), but planar might be better on real hardware?

Anyways: Implemented so far: Global 64 color palette (actually stored as 32-bit ints because they write faster to the pixmap this way). I can load and convert .bmp files into 1-bit and 3-bit tile table data, then into the appropriate VRAM region. The Name table and Attribute table are in their appropriate VRAM regions and the palettes work. Rendering the 1-bit and 3-bit tiles works, as does the flat color override special case. I have a routine for setting up zones of multiple screen, with bounded scrolling, and there's a simple tile editor.

Version 8. (Code name: "Moonfinger") I turned a near white cyan-blue into another mid blue to facilitate sky gradient play.Might nuke the white-green and replace with a deep blood red, as I only have an orange red now and quite a jump to the adjacents. That said, the reds that I have are useful enough... I haven't really been missing a new red, and having gaps gives the palette some character, because now my lone red is that red. Maybe another skin tone then? Bad banding, dither or sick hues are quite unsightly on humans, less so on rocks, monsters and thingamajibs.

Version 7. (Code name: "Brighter Days") I made this palette using a lighter gamma (1.8 or 2.0 on my Mac), but PCs and TVs use 2.2 iirc (makes the images darker) so I lightened/curved up the palette a tad.

For v.6 I only changed one of the cold greens which was a bit too close to its neighbors, and one of the high skin tones (which was really to desaturated to be used as such) turned into a sandy bone color. Beaches are pretty common in games. Maybe I should check if I have an underwater sand color suitable for beaches too...? Later!

How did I choose these 64 colors? I think a palette made for 8 color sprites works differently from a 4 color one. In a 4 color palette, sprites are likely to use graphically strong flats. With 8 colors you can do more shadow+light, and in-betweens. Some of my colors are set up to fill those roles, but I also wanted to keep the strong NES color feel. I'm a big fan of including dark shades for black background games (I often favour that over textured backgrounds, so I don't have a lot of fogged colors I suppose).

Spartan X / Kung Fu: Beat em up games have a lot of large body animation frames, so palette swapped bodies is probably necessary to save tile space. It's a bit harder to puzzle together new poses from different small tiles when the colors aren't NES flat though.

Castlevania: Being more conservative with the colors here. Wall noise could use some work, as it's very haphazard. Unhappy with the muddy blocks here. They need to pop. I want to fit a Castlevania pink-orange into the palette somehow. (done in V4?)

Sonic: A bit gritty, though maybe it has more to do with the overpopulation of features/characters which happens in mockups. Trying to pay heed to the color identity of the original game with the dark sky and colored background. Can't do parallax so maybe background tiles should be more fogged than in the original, or they might look like foreground stuff. Maybe some fog on the lake to get the same effect as the bright water in the original (odd since the sky is so dark).

Chaos Angels: If the system has a real bitmap mode (probably only fast enough for visual novels and the like), maybe Chaos Angels might look something like this. I didn't optimize the palette into little 8x8 chunks, because then I'd need to be clever and patient Doable though. 16 colors used here for both BG+FG.

The Turtles and Shadow of the Beast mockups highlighted some problems with missing values in the green ramp. Shadow of the Beast can't really be done with this palette because of the long desaturated ramps, so I made a saturated version with the same hues. However, it seems I don't have any ramps around the light gray.

Psycho Fox: I didn't have just the right orange for the fox, so I used light, shadow and saturated edge to give the surface some vibrancy, but ended up sort of breaking my color count limits in the process. Garbled terrain, still. I might refine it later. The dirt had some strange ultra yellow happening with no special texture (hints of a rhomboid?) so I didn't know where to take that. I'll have to redo.

Fantasy Star and Gods: Wanted to test the pastel range out here. I guess it sort of works. Gods made me realize that I needed another grayish color so I eventually made that (gray teal) but didn't use it much on the mockup. I failed to mix one with just dithering.

Wonderboy (Wondergirl): I didn't have the appropriate yellows so I did some dithering and buffering just so I could stay close to the color identity of the game. The blue hair is a homage to the skateboard helmet Wonderboy wears. I saw the original game in action on a cruise ship way back, and remember being very impressed by all the cool things which could happen in the game. I guess to a child's imagination a game can seem boundless like that. I redid some of the colors in V.6 so the mockup looks slightly better now.

Megaman (Megagirl): I dreaded doing this mockup because it's such an important game. I was dismayed that my V.5 palette lacked the correct flat blues, but by using a mix of light and shadow I could sort of approximate the colors. With 8 colors I don't need an extra sprite for the face, but I boldly added a ponytail which will be flailing about. 2351a5e196