Kizul's Definitive NTSC NES Master Palette

For Emulators and Other Myriad Purposes

It looks pretty fantastic with NEStopia's NTSC filter applied!

With hexadecimal color index notations:

00
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
0A
0B
0C
0D
0E
0F
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
1A
1B
1C
1D
1E
1F
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
2A
2B
2C
2D
2E
2F
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
3A
3B
3C
3D
3E
3F
I personally refer to the columns of colors as thus (from left to right): Blue, Indigo, Blue-Violet, Purple, Pink,
Red-Orange, Gold, Yellow, Lime Green, Plain Green, Blue-Green/Teal, Turqoise.

For some reason, $0D is much darker than the other blacks ($1D, $xE, and $xF), and some games -- specifically, Bee 52 and The Immortal -- use $0D for the main background color instead of one of the other blacks: $1D, or an entry in the $xE or $xF columns; when a television's brightness settings are calibrated correctly, this causes the aforementioned other blacks to appear as a charcoal gray, allowing games to get an extra shade of color out of the palette.

In light of this, all other non-$0D blacks are an 'off-black' color. In the .Zip file (downloadable below), there's a palette file specifically for Bee 52 which has a brightened $1D color, so as to emulate the effect that the game exploits, allowing various background details to show in all-black levels.

(Sadly, by default, every NES emulator I've ever used completely ignores the fact that $0D is a darker black than $1D and $xE/$xF, and emulates $1D, $xE, and $xF as the same color of pure black as $0D.)

Bear in mind, however, that the modification to $1D is a special case designed only to accommodate Bee 52; under ordinary circumstances, $1D is identical in brightness to $xE and $xF (as seen above).

The Immortal, however, goes one step further into madness by enabling three specific bits -- frequently referred to as "Color Emphasis Bits" -- to dim the NES palette's colors down. (Excluding $xE and $xF, which are completely unaffected by Color Emphasis, though certain emulators are a little inaccurate, and end up dimming the entire palette, including $xE and $xF.)

This, however, leads to something that televisions do that emulators don't: a television -- at least, a CRT TV -- will compensate for the extra-dim colors by brightening the screen until $0D is an off-black (like $1D/$xE/$xF above) instead of pure black. At least, it'll be 'off-black' if the TV's brightness is set correctly.

The brightening of the screen causes a secondary effect, too: because The Immortal uses all three Color Emphasis Bits to dim the majority of the palette, it causes $0D to be dimmed even further; thus, when the television brightens the screen to compensate, it brightens $xE and $xF more than usual (and also brightens $1D a little), allowing for a fantastic shade of gray that the game uses for shading characters in battle -- among other things.

Thus, when emulating The Immortal, in order to make it look the way it would on an actual television screen, you must increase the Brightness setting in whatever emulator you're using, if you can, until the background black is a charcoal black. In NEStopia, this means increasing the Brightness (in Video Settings) to 0.31. Elsewise, the entire palette -- especially $1D, $xE, and $xF -- will be too dark, and the extra charcoal gray will not show.

(Alternatively, you can use the Game Genie codes below and the specific palette file that I made for The Immortal included in the .Zip; doing so makes the game look correct.)

Screenshot of The Immortal taken from FCEUX, demonstrating how most emulators display the $1D/$xE/$xF palette indices incorrectly.

This is how most emulators display the colors $1D, $xE, and $xF, using The Immortal as an example.
Screenshot of The Immortal taken from NEStopia, using the custom palette from this page, with brightness boosted to 0.31.

This is how The Immortal is actually supposed to look. Besides a minor tinting change (and brighter black), notice anything different?
Screenshot of The Immortal taken from NEStopia, using the custom palette from this page, but without a brightness boost.

And this is how The Immortal appears if you use the palette I have made, but don't boost the emulator's Brightness. This isn't bad -- it's playable, at least -- but it really is much too dim. (Much dimmer than it appears on an actual CRT TV with properly-set brightness, at least.)

Click here for a screenshots gallery to see this palette in action, and compare it with other palettes from a multitude of emulators, many of which have been lost to the bowels of time. (Some have been forgotten for very good reasons...)