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Comment by cbolton | Hacker News Reader

There's a similar issue with retro video games and emulators: the screens on the original devices often had low color saturation, so the RGB data in those games were very saturated to compensate. Then people took the ROMs to use in emulators with modern screens, and the colors are over-saturated or just off. That's why you often see screenshots of retro games with ridiculously bright colors. Thankfully now many emulators implement filters to reproduce colors closer to the original look.

Some examples:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Gameboy/comments/bvqaec/why_and_how...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA-aQMUXKPM

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With the GBA, the original GBA screen and the first gen GBA SP had very washed out colors and not saturated at all. The Mario ports to the GBA looked doubly since they desaturated their colors and were shown on a desaturated screen. I've heard that the real reason the colors were desaturated was because the first GBA model didn't have a backlight so the colors were lightened to be more visible, but I'm not quite sure that's the case. Lots of other games didn't do that.

And with the second version of the GBA SP and the GB Micro, colors were very saturated. Particularly on the SP. If anything, cranking up the saturation on an emulator would get you closer to how things looked on those models, while heavily desaturating would get you closer to the look on earlier models.

> With the GBA, the original GBA screen and the first gen GBA SP had very washed out colors and not saturated at all. The Mario ports to the GBA looked doubly since they desaturated their colors and were shown on a desaturated screen. I've heard that the real reason the colors were desaturated was because the first GBA model didn't have a backlight so the colors were lightened to be more visible,

That's certainly the case. The super low screen brightness of the first GBA was a major problem, because you often literally couldn't see things properly under less than perfect ambient light. So compensating for low brightness was more important than compensating for low color saturation, which is merely an aesthetic issue.

The most egregious example is old CGA games that were written to work on composite monitors. Without the composite display, they appear monochrome or cyan and magenta.

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/7229541/215890834-...

It blew my mind when I finally learnt this, as I spent years of my childhood playing games that looked like the examples on the left, not realising the colours were due to the RGB monitor I had.

Oh you’re blowing my mind right now, played lots of CGA games with neon colours as a kid. What did they look like on a composite monitor?

Also, are you able to tell me the name of the game in the second row in that screenshot?

Ah yes, we often get folks in the nesdev community bickering over which "NES Palette" (sourced from their favorite emulator) is the "best" one. The reality is extraordinarily complicated and I'm barely qualified to explain it:

https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/PPU_palettes#2C02

In addition to CRTs having variable properties, it turns out a lot of consoles (understandably!) cheat a little bit when generating a composite signal. The PPU's voltages are slightly out of spec, its timing is weird to work around a color artifact issue, and it generates a square wave for the chroma carrier rather than an ideal sine wave, which produces even more fun problems near the edges. So we've got all of that going on, and then the varying properties of how each TV chooses to interpret the signal. Then we throw electrons at phosphors and the pesky real world and human perception gets involved... it's a real mess!

Final Fantasy Tactics on Game Boy Advance had a color mode for television.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/F29nlIz_tWo

Nice, and two LCD modes to adapt to different GBA screens! (presumably the GBA and GBA SP first model, vs the GBA SP second model with backlight)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sxKJeYSBmI

This video is related to that issue

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