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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't the palette chosen by Nintendo for use in first-party emulators going for a "nostalgic" feel (e.g. the NES Classic's https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Kachikachi) be in some sense the "canonical" palette? At least in the same way that an author's statements about their own previously-published works are "canonical" to those works.

My thinking is that there was certainly an RGB palette that the designers — probably working on something like an Amiga — chose when creating the pixel art for the games; and that Nintendo likely has institutional memory, if not hard records, of what that design-time palette was; and so later palettes in RGB-based emulators were likely chosen to closely resemble those design-time palettes.

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To throw a few wrenches into that:

* As evidenced by the fact that the (RGB-based) Nintendo VS. System has a different palette than later emulation releases, even at the time Nintendo wasn't sure of the "correct" RGB palette (or has since come around and changed their mind about what that should be).

* There wasn't really any sort of standard devkit. Different developers, different games, different artists used different hardware and software tools to draw their graphics. Nintendo was notoriously crappy to third-party developers during the Famicom years, and Western developers in particular had little institutional support from them. Even if you had the correct palette that Nintendo was using between 1988 and 1991, that's not necessarily what Rare was using in 1990, or what Square was using in 1987, or...

* The Famicom was released in 1983, and development on it began in 1982. There was no Amiga, no Atari ST, no X68000, no VGA, no mainstream computers really capable of general purpose graphics editing. Developers often had to come up with bespoke systems for editing graphics at the time, including bespoke hardware - and it's entirely possible these bespoke systems used a similar non-RGB design as the Famicom, or even the same PPU, or were even just editing programs on a Famicom with some kind of serial-out hacked in.

* Philosophically speaking, the artists were aware that they were producing graphics for the Famicom/NES. That is, they weren't looking at whatever RGB output they had as the definitive version, but just as a rough guideline for how the image would appear on TVs. Given that, whatever RGB the devkit might've been spitting out isn't "definitive" in the sense of how the artist intended anyone to see it.

* I don't really trust Nintendo to make any extra effort to provide an "authentic" experience in their re-releases: witness, for instance, the low quality of the N64 emulation in the Switch Online Expansion Pack they just put out. The actual people who did the art may be gone or uninvolved in the re-releases; just because they own the copyright I don't think whatever Nintendo slaps together really represents the intent of the artists themselves, in the same way that I don't think, say, the release of Go Set a Watchman says anything about the intent of Harper Lee.

>output they had as the definitive version, but just as a rough guideline for how the image would appear on TVs.

We have seen photos featuring people using nice, pro or broadcast grade CRT displays. Given the lack of an RGB authority, and the limited number of colors, it is likely each group just used whatever references that made sense to them.

And regions. PAL, SECAM, other variants all added noise.

I'll bet a standard consumer grade TV with RF was a small part of many dev processes too. Just a check on effects and or particularly troublesome color combinations. The pro or broadcast grade displays would often render those better than one might expect, but your average TV would likely display a hopefully interesting blur...

RGB images suggest this check on a basic RF TV because some of the pixel art choices may have been different, given better display signals were an option.

For me personally, viewing an NES on a better quality composite display works best for me. Personal preference, and that is due to having composite capable displays early on. I used composite more than anything else. But all that said, the NES RF modulator was respectable. Worked better than many did.

Often, the design choice was a long cable to the TV.

I had a few systems that parked the modulator right next to the signal input on the TV. TI Home computer had a huge one, but it really was great. I used it for many different systems. There was a modulator for PS1 that you could use with a very short connection. And the NES.

RF done that way worked well enough.

To the last point I just wanted to point out that they've recently patched a lot of the graphical issues on the N64 emulator (including texture coordinate issues and fog in OoT).

While I still feel the original quality was shameful, I recently upgraded my subscription and I have been enjoying it with no issues.

> I don't really trust Nintendo to make any extra effort to provide an "authentic" experience in their re-releases

To add to that, the emulation of old games is handled by the NERD group at Nintendo, based in France (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_European_Research_%26...). Nintendo is not a monolithic block, and internal groups will have vastly different opinions on how things should look.

> That is, they weren't looking at whatever RGB output they had as the definitive version, but just as a rough guideline for how the image would appear on TVs. Given that, whatever RGB the devkit might've been spitting out isn't "definitive" in the sense of how the artist intended anyone to see it.

I don't think it's necessarily even very likely that they were looking at rgb from a devkit. These days people associate PVMs and other pro monitors with RGB but they aren't synonymous. Take a look through ebay listing for PVMs and you'll find plenty of composite or s-video-ish pro monitors from the 80s kicking around.

And even some microcomputer monitors were composite. If the dev tooling they used was based on a C64 or Apple IIe (which also used 6502 cpus), that'd be composite out for eg., even with a designed-for-c64/appleIIe monitor. And I'm pretty sure I've seen photos of people using Apple IIe or similar for NES dev.

> Given that, whatever RGB the devkit might've been spitting out isn't "definitive" in the sense of how the artist intended anyone to see it.

Sure, but that's not what I meant.

Back when images were being bit-banged into computers, you didn't really care what the results looked like on the screen of your workstation, if your workstation wasn't the target system. You designed on paper — usually grid paper — and then iterated from there by flashing an EEPROM and checking the results on the machine.

When I say "the design colors", I mean the marker-pen colors used to color the grid paper. You might also call these the "pre-color-grading" palette.

Certainly, the artist would get a different idea about what they wanted a thing to look like, once the image had been passed through the "color grading" of the NES palette; and so would then iterate toward a design that most-closely lined up the vision in their head with what the NES could actually produce.

But the artist's original intent wasn't to achieve that iteratatively-color-graded final result image; it was to achieve the original colors they had put down on the grid paper. That original intent was just stymied by the system; and so they had to settle for the colors the system could do.

(I realize that modern designers working with retro art styles often design from scratch under palette constraints; but video games were much newer then, and so most of the professional art-and-design people working in the industry had never done digital art before, and had been trained / previously worked only in traditional art. The closest their designers would have got to the kind of constraints imposed by the NES would be in designing neon signs.)

The problem is that Nintendo is not consistent about NES palettes either. Their different emulators all have different palettes, https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Famicom_color_p... goes as far as to suggest their latest emulator (the one that is part of Nintendo Switch Online service) has as many as 12 different palettes where the palette picked depends on a game. Nintendo did have NES-based arcade systems that used RGB, however the problem is that their color choices were really ugly.

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