Kizul's Definitive NTSC NES Master Palette

Click here for a screenshots gallery to see this palette in action, and compare it with other palettes from myriad authors.

Many of the emulators listed in the gallery have been more or less lost to the bowels of time (some for very good reasons...), but my screenshots gallery stands as a historical mausoleum for those emulators' palettes. :)

Download the above palette for emulators.
It's compatible with pretty much any emulator that allows you to load a custom palette.

This palette is the final* product of over three years of messing around, on and off, with trying to get a palette that matched what my actual NES Control Deck output on my CRT TVs, particularly my current favorite: an Emerson EWF2004A. (Its speakers are terrible, but the picture quality — especially from its S-Video port — is fantastic. <3)

The Very Short Version: I hooked my NES and PC up to the same CRT TV and eyeballed the colors until what my PC was trying to display on the screen matched as closely as possible what the NES was displaying on that same screen.

The Probably-Overly-Detailed Step-By-Step Version: I had my NES hooked up to a video switcher device that has two outputs on it and can output both Composite video — the best that the NES can output — and S-Video simultaneously, and converts each signal type to the other.

I hooked up one of that video switcher's S-Video outputs — and an HDMI-to-S-Video converter box I was using with my PC — up to the S-Video ports of another video switcher (an Extron Media Presentation Switcher (MPS), specifically), which output to the S-Video In on my CRT TV, and allowed me to effortlessly flip between displaying a picture from my PC and a picture from my NES on the same screen.

I also set my PC's color output mode to "YCbCr444" in hopes that the video signal would be closer to the NES's YIQ video signal than limited-range RGB would be.

I filled the picture of the NES with a specific color of its palette; then, on my PC — with Photoshop running in borderless full-screen mode and zoomed in so that only a screen-sized block of color was visible on the TV screen — I filled the picture from my PC with a color that was very similar to what the NES displayed. Flipping between my NES and my PC, I tweaked the color in Photoshop until the color it displayed and the color my NES displayed made my TV behave the same.

Most people try to eyeball the colors of their NES and TV on another monitor/screen, ignoring the fact that — in most cases — the color space of the two screens is completely different. Either that or they just use a video capture card, but that's hardly a guaranteed method of getting 100%-accurate colors.

I figure that my method of matching phosphor response yields a far more accurate palette than any other method, since it would generate a set of colors that would look the same as the NES on any display it was hooked up to. Unfortunately, when I was creating this palette, I discovered that my video card has a much brighter "black" level than the NES does, so making the darker colors of the palette was very difficult.

Additionally, the NES outputs a 240p video signal — which has apparent scanlines —, but my PC can only output a video signal of 480i (which has no apparent scanlines). In order to get rid of the appearance of scanlines, I looked through a small jeweler's glass at the screen to make it appear as blurry as possible, which allowed me to focus purely on matching the hue, saturation, and brightness of each color.

I use this palette in NES emulators on my hacked Wii, and it looks slightly dimmer than the actual hardware at first — but after a few minutes of playing, I don't even notice anymore, and it seems nearly indistiguishable to my actual Control Deck; hence why I refer to it as my "Definitive NTSC NES Palette". :)

My palette also uses off-black blacks for palette entries $1D, $xE, and $xF: something that almost no one else has bothered to put in their palettes, even though it's something that the NES canonically does.

*I say it's "final", but if I get someone to make a specific homebrew utility for me that'll run in 240p on a Wii, I might create one more final version. However: for now, this palette is as close to perfect as I can manage, and perfecting it further is very low on my list of priorities. :)