Original title screen color - green or olive?

[IMBerzerk]

So silly question of the day...

 

What actually is the correct color for the 'title' screen of the original Intv games like Space Battle, Football... etc?

 

I've tested and cleaned many units, and I have 3 CRT TV that I use to test them, they all seem to be more olive in color. Using an emulator will give me green. Many of the screen shots and videos on Youtube and across the I-net seem to go in both directions...

 

Ex... If you start all of the following videos and pause them at the title screen, you'll quickly see my point.

 

Emulation?

 

looks like a feed direct from an actual unit... 2 different Youtubers

 

So, what is then... green or olive? I can't seem to pin down the actual color. Not for anything else other than knowing after 40 years... lol

 

Thanks,

 

JR

Edited January 6, 2019 by IMBerzerk

[+intvsteve]

...or brown?

 

IIRC the older manuals show brown title screens:

 

 

And in fact on PAL systems, they *are* brown.

 

The old joke I've heard is that NTSC stands for "Never The Same Color". As a kid, I tried fiddling with all kinds of knobs on the back of the TV to get that brown.

[mthompson]

Everybody is right! Intellivision's "brown" color is more like olive green. Because emulators vary in their color choices, so you can't always go by them.

 

Intellivision "tan" is another stretch of the imagination. In the title screen, it's the rectangle just to the left of red. On a TV "tan" is kind of a sick yellow, but in the above videos it's all over the place.

[mr_me]

That brown was probably what the intellivision artists and designers originally intended. I think for whatever reason the final product came out differently and they lived with it. Oh well.

 

I have to say the titlescreen in the new jzintv is too green for me. Jzintv now has the sky in B17 Bomber pinkish, which is how it looks on my year 2000 crt; but not how I remember it on the old 1980 crt.

[IMBerzerk]

I have to agree... the greens are too green. The water in Armor Battle looks purple/pink. The title screen should be more olive color. Can that be tweaked manually at all?

[mthompson]

I have to agree... the greens are too green. The water in Armor Battle looks purple/pink. The title screen should be more olive color. Can that be tweaked manually at all?

 

Yes. The newer versions of jzIntv let you use any color palette you want by adding the --gfx-palette flag. You can check out the discussion of colors in this thread. I also posted the color palette I settled on for myself here.

 

Note that Joe made changes to jzintv's default color palette after that discussion ran its course. However, people will probably still disagree about the accuracy of some of them.

[Flojomojo]

Probably depends on how your monitor is set. I'd call it an olive green, based on my memory of the era.

 

Fun fact: the "command gold" shirts on Star Trek are actually green.

http://www.startrek.com/article/shirts-and-skins-in-tos

 

I'd place the Intellivision title cards as close to that color. Maybe you could say the emulators have a "color bias" towards green.

[Walter Ives]

On 1/6/2019 at 10:04 AM, IMBerzerk said:

So silly question of the day... What actually is the correct color for the 'title' screen of the original Intv games like Space Battle, Football... etc? ... So, what is then... green or olive? I can't seem to pin down the actual color. Not for anything else other than knowing after 40 years...

Dave James declared that color to be brown, so it's brown. Exactly the same brown of the colored illustrator's marker that he used to represent it in his graphics. Adjust the tint and color controls of your TV set until you get a nice, rich, warm satisfying brown. Or not; if you like another color better, use that.