Screenshots Gallery

For pixeltao's NES Palette (version 2)

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These screenshots were generated by NEStopia; if you see any oddities at the top and/or bottom, that's because NEStopia's screenshots ignore overscan clip settings, thus showing the top and bottom 8 pixels that are normally hidden on an NTSC television (and in most emulators).

This is the second version of pixeltao's NES palette, made a week later with a bit of extra care. :)

From pixeltao's blog:

“UPDATE:

After a week of testing various games, I’ve decided to go back and make some improvements to my NES palette. This time, in order to get an even more accurate result, I used an EverDrive (generously lent by Michael Larouche, in support for my palette related obsession issues). I ran the “Palette Test by Loopy” rom on my Famicom hooked up to my CRT TV and I compared the colors with 2 different LCDs running the same palette rom through Nestopia. This allowed me to carefully balance all colors with one another. Here’s a summary of the improvements I’ve made:

  • Adjusted hues of the greens and purples.
  • Balanced brightness of all colors.
  • Added missing dark gray (not used in any of the games I sampled).
  • No pure white (NES white appears to be slightly gray).

Colors of this palette are balanced with one another, but I’ve notice that they may appear off on some LCD screens because of color temperature settings. So, for example, if colors appear too bright or seem to be shifted towards blue or red, you can easily fix this by adjusting color temperature or changing the picture mode (”cinema”, for example) of your LCD screen.

Here are the download links for pixeltaoNES palette version 2:

Raw palette version (for emulators)

Photoshop color swatches”

It looks better, but the blue parts of Metroid still look a little flat. :(

Bee 52

Interestingly, this palette has a brightened $1D black, so various background details show! :D

Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt

Adventure Island II

Adventures of Lolo 2

Battle Chess

Super Mario Bros. 3

Adventures of Lolo 3

If the animation sticks, just wait a few seconds. It SHOULD restart. :)

Battletoads

This is my personal favorite line from Professor T. Bird.

Bucky O'Hare

Dragon Warrior

Metroid

If the animation sticks, just wait a few seconds. It SHOULD restart. :)

Dragon Warrior III

Legendary Wings

The last vertical-scrolling level uses $11 and $12 in a way that creates a really cool texture when playing the game on actual hardware and on a CRT TV. :D

The Legend of Zelda

Dragon Warrior IV

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

Solstice: Quest for
the Staff of Demnos

Monster in My Pocket

Adventures of Tom Sawyer

The alligator boss at the end of the rafting level uses two greens ($19 and $1A) that, on my actual NES Control Deck, are
almost indistinguishable — but they do add a cool texture due to the composite artefacting! :D
Avoid the lighter ink blasts! The darker ones will ink you up, but the LIGHTER ones will INSTANTLY KILL YOU. To be honest, I never knew there even WERE two different colors until I really studied this game for screenshots.

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All games whose images are upon this page belong to their respective creators. I'm simply using images from the games to demonstrate the palettes that I and others have made.