New User-Defined Palette File for Stella

[SeaGtGruff]

I took Trebor's new 7800 NTSC palette and made a Stella-compatible version for the 2600. (See the original thread here.)

 

First I removed the odd-numbered colors. A Stella palette file includes the PAL and SECAM colors, too. For the PAL colors I just copied the NTSC colors, replaced hues $1, $E, and $F with hue $0, and scrambled the remaining hues ($2 through $D) into the PAL order-- so the "PAL" colors are really NTSC colors, just reduced in number and scrambled. For the SECAM colors I used the SECAM colors from Stella's default palette.

 

The attached stella.zip file contains ten files-- nine pictures plus the stella.pal user-defined palette file. The nine pictures (shown below) display the default Stella palettes, the Z26 palettes, and the user-defined palettes, for NTSC, PAL, and SECAM.

 

Stella's default palette - NTSC:

 

Z26 palette - NTSC:

 

User-defined palette - NTSC:

 

Stella's default palette - PAL:

 

Z26 palette - PAL:

 

User-defined palette - PAL:

 

Stella's default palette - SECAM:

 

Z26 palette - SECAM:

 

User-defined palette - SECAM:

 

stella.zip

[iesposta]

Why is the lightest User-defined palette - NTSC red indigo violet and blue all the same pink-purple?

Is it something to do with the web display of color?

The Stella default shows 4 different light colors.

 

[SeaGtGruff]

Why is the lightest User-defined palette - NTSC red indigo violet and blue all the same pink-purple?

Is it something to do with the web display of color?

The Stella default shows 4 different light colors.

When I view the picture I posted and hover the mouse over those colors while running the Color Detector program, they do have different RGB values. Granted, they're close in color to each other. When I run my 128 color palette program on my heavy sixer, some of the darkest and lightest colors do look very similar to each other for some of the hues. Somewhere on my computer I have a screenshot I captured from my heavy sixer, but I'm having trouble finding it right now. I think I posted it in another thread a year or two ago; if I find it I'll link to it or repost it here for comparison.

 

Edit: I found my heavy sixer screen capture. It looks kind of dark on my computer monitor-- a lot darker than it looked on my TV (TVs usually have a higher gamma setting)-- so I had bumped up the brightness and contrast in a paint program to try to get brighter brights while keeping the darks dark. The two screenshots are shown below-- the untouched original (well, I did scale it down a bit, but no adjustments to the colors), and the modified one:

 

 

 

But to get back to your original question, the colors you see may look a little different than the colors other people see, due to differences in the monitors, the settings on the monitors, and the color depth of your desktop display. For example, I have two monitors side-by-side at work, and it's nearly impossible to get identical colors on them, even if they're both set to the same settings as each other. Welcome to the wonderful world of "AARGH!!!"

 

Second edit: This screen capture shows hue 15 with a decidely green tinge. The interesting thing is, if I play DVD recording that I made of my heavy sixer, the color of hue 15 changes from frame to frame-- on some frames it's greenish (as shown here), but on other frames it's more brownish (as in Trebor's palette). I see the same phenomenon in the video I captured from my 7800 running the same palette program.

Edited October 23, 2012 by SeaGtGruff

[eshu]

Firstly, thanks to you and trebor for for this - it's great!!

 

Apparently there was an error in the palette I think you based this off: http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/204247-new-generated-ntsc-color-palette-files/page__st__25#entry2634890 - did you produce yours manually or can you just run the new palette through a tool? It might be possible to get the right palette by just adjusting the hue on the tv effects menu on stella, but I'm not sure what value would correspond to the 3 degree adjustment.....

[SeaGtGruff]

Firstly, thanks to you and trebor for for this - it's great!!

 

Apparently there was an error in the palette I think you based this off: http://www.atariage....25#entry2634890 - did you produce yours manually or can you just run the new palette through a tool? It might be possible to get the right palette by just adjusting the hue on the tv effects menu on stella, but I'm not sure what value would correspond to the 3 degree adjustment.....

I opened Trebor's palette in Multi-Edit in the binary mode, with a record length of three bytes, then defined a macro to remove the lines for the odd-numbered colors, so creating the NTSC palette was easy and I can redo it quickly. It was a bit more work to get the PAL palette, because I had to cut and paste the lines for the NTSC palette to rearrange them in the PAL order-- but it shouldn't take too long to redo that for the corrected palette.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Where is the advantage of using NTSC colors in PAL mode?

 

Makes no sense to me...

[+Random Terrain]

So are you saying that these colors are more correct? Should I change the colors on this page to match:

 

www.randomterrain.com/atari-2600-memories-tia-color-charts.html

 

 

Thanks.

[iesposta]

So are you saying that these colors are more correct? Should I change the colors on this page to match:

 

www.randomterrain.com/atari-2600-memories-tia-color-charts.html

 

 

Thanks.

 

You might want to consider it.

When designing "Kong" I used the brown F color. On some TVs it matched Stella, but on other TVs and a DLP chip projector and an LCD Kong was green unless you severely adjusted the tint.

So a pallet showing the F color line shifted towards green I think would be a good idea.