Intellivision Color Palette v. Atari 2600 Color Palette

[Intymike]

6 minutes ago, carlsson said:

I wonder if they issued a revised service manual? I mean it would be embarrassing enough if a magazine article made that mistake but a service manual which also repeats the information thrice is something more. Or perhaps the intended readers of the service manual would be familiar enough with the Intellivision to not really need a list of which colours it can generate, only how to fix if it doesn't.

The date of my copy is from September 1982. A month after the introduction of the Intellivision in Germany. Maybe they did a revision (I probably should ask the only other owner of a German service manual I know) or maybe left it that way because they had not enough time until Mattel Electronics was closed down just 1 1/2 years later. 

[IMBerzerk]

2 hours ago, mr_me said:

That colour is used for the sky in many cartridges, water in others.  The newer the TV, the less blue it looks.  On my trinitron the sky in B17 looks pinkish.

 

The pal intellivision has completely different electronics when it comes to colours.  It might be closer to what the original Mattel designers intended but I didn't know it was missing a colour.

 

With the c64 they designed eight colours and the other eight was a result of an ntsc trick to save on circuitry.  Pal circuits are going to do something completely different with that trick.

I've always wondered why.  Aren't colors data points, or for C64 Poke entries?  I understand why the color will look different from display to display because of slight frequency differences... But I didn't know it came down to actual circuitry.  

 

I wonder how this is accomplished on arcade PCBs to make everything so uniform regardless of region.  I imagine it has a lot to do with the monitor being a dedicated display unit, rather than a TV...as they are different.  

 

Very interesting subject!  ?

[Walter Ives]

On 2/9/2021 at 11:03 AM, mr_me said:

The limitation imposed was from ram and money, because ram was expensive.

Not really. It's kind of involved, but there were other factors that were far more significant.

 

On 2/23/2021 at 8:10 PM, Intelligentleman said:

I like to think some designers considered how the game would look on an average consumer's display. With a proper cable and preferably a tube TV, an Intellivision program can look great.

Although GI began designing the STIC in 1976 and APh began programming it in late 1977, by 1980 all development setups were using SONY Trinitrons. APh and Chandler's group had test areas with earlier model TVs they had accumulated; don't know about Baum's. APh's graphics editing bay was also outfitted with multiple different brands, Baum's editing bay wasn't.

On 2/24/2021 at 6:19 PM, BSRSteve said:

Here is what the STIC manual says

Over the years all y'all have spent a lot of stomach lining agonizing over colors. You've been going about it all wrong. The definitive colors are the ones listed in this STIC document.

In 1976, when Harrower and Maine conceived the STIC chipset, most television sets in customers' homes were still vacuum tube based. Their circuits drifted as they warmed up, and their internal trim settings drifted over time too. As a result, all TV sets came with Luminance, Tint and Color knobs (alternatively and interchangeably called Brightness, Hue and Saturation). Every child knew to play with those knobs until they got the best looking picture, which usually meant trying to get the flesh tones to look right. Often you'd even change the settings when you changed TV stations. TV engineers took weird pleasure in continually harping that NTSC stood for "Never Twice the Same Color."

Dave James was responsible for designing the initial Intellivision graphics (subject to Chang's approval). He used the names in this document and professional (=expensive) illustrator markers of those colors to specify the palette he wanted. So if you want the intended colors, ask James what manufacturer's illustrator markers he used (probably Prismacolor®) and match those colors as close as you can.

GI, Mattel and APh worked together to select color ROM values that would generate colors that were arguably close to the ones James wanted by trial-and-error, with Brian Dougherty programming an untold number of 74S288 32x8 Field Programmable PROMs in the process. Dougherty didn't have a PROM programmer available, so every iteration required him to make a round trip to a local Radio Shack. APh, which was a prolific user of 74S288's, did have a PROM programmer, but nevertheless said nuts to that and cobbled together a high speed color chip emulator using TTL register files (probably 74170s).

It was the expectation of all involved that Intellivision users would adjust the Luminance, Tint and Color, and on some TVs the Contrast and Sharpness, to get the best-looking picture for a particular game. The Master Component Owner's Manual, printed in 1978, explicitly states, "Adjust volume, picture and color controls to a pleasing level" on page 6. Take that statement to heart.

As it turned out, the most important color in the palette is color 12, color 11 if you start numbering at 0, as would any rational programmer or engineer. Dave James wanted that color to be brown so, by definition, it's brown. Why was that particular color used as the TV adjustment standard? Because it is very noticeable when it's a bit off. Blue, red and green are all primaries with their own guns, so there's some visual tolerance in those colors, but brown is a mixture of red and green and you can easily tell if the balance isn't quite right. When APh designed the title screen it picked brown for the background so users could easily adjust the color controls. Everyone in Chandler's group knew this. Chandler attended all of the major trade shows and passed the knowledge on to Marketing staff as they set up the TVs.

Now say your game doesn't use much brown, but has a lot of sky, like Biplanes. If you're a 12-year old of the time, you know exactly what to do: reach over and adjust the tint control of your set until the sky is light blue. Duh.

Technology was moving fast, and by 1979 advancing technology allowed more expensive televisions to be equipped with circuitry that gave them some ability to self-adjust for color (see

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqwG6AyXyY0,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FtpnmRYPy0).

But color TVs were expensive and families didn't replace them very often, so it took a while for the new technology to propagate. Both Baum's group and APh bought new high-end state of the art SONY Trinitrons for development. The brightness/tint/color knobs on these sets had detents, so those sets had a nominally correct position for those controls. Until disabused, new staff were under the mistaken impression that the colors rendered when the controls were in the detent position were somehow the "right" ones.

The upshot is that base color palette should be one for which color 12 is a beautiful, rich brown; definitely NOT that yucky olive y'all have been using. And, intvnut, if you really want to model the Intellivision properly you should update your emulator to include user tint/color/luminance/sharpness/contrast controls. That should keep you busy for a while.

On 2/24/2021 at 6:23 PM, atari2600land said:

Why is #14 referred to as blue? It looks like a light purple.

Because Dave James declared color #14 to be light blue. If you're playing biplanes, adjust the TINT control on your TV until it is.

 

 

On 2/24/2021 at 6:30 PM, IMBerzerk said:

On 2/24/2021 at 6:19 PM, BSRSteve said:

Here is what the STIC manual says

That last line says it all...

That line is a legal disclaimer. The document is an early version of a "Customer Procurement Specification" that that was an attachment to a purchasing contract. Even though Mattel knew precisely what it was getting, GI wasn't about to commit to an iron-clad contract with a subjective description of the colors.

 

On 2/25/2021 at 9:57 AM, IMBerzerk said:

I wonder how this is accomplished on arcade PCBs to make everything so uniform regardless of region.

I'd do it by designing in a Wells Gardner K7000 series monitor with component video (RGB) inputs. But that's me.

 

[+DZ-Jay]

On 12/3/2022 at 8:18 AM, Walter Ives said:

As it turned out, the most important color in the palette is color 12, color 11 if you start numbering at 0, as would any rational programmer or engineer. Dave James wanted that color to be brown so, by definition, it's brown. Why was that particular color used as the TV adjustment standard? Because it is very noticeable when it's a bit off. Blue, red and green are all primaries with their own guns, so there's some visual tolerance in those colors, but brown is a mixture of red and green and you can easily tell if the balance isn't quite right. When APh designed the title screen it picked brown for the background so users could easily adjust the color controls. Everyone in Chandler's group knew this. Chandler attended all of the major trade shows and passed the knowledg on to Marketing staff as they set up the TVs.

 

I wish someone would have mentioned that in the manual.  My fading memories of childhood include, burnt-into my visual cortex, that drab olive green color in the title screen as displayed on my little Toshiba television set (or was it Panasonic?  I think it was Panasonic) in my room.

 

I never thought to adjust the knobs enough to turn it brown, although I would have gladly done so had I been directed to by word or reference.

 

(I did notice some Mattel marketing materials or manuals which showed the screen in brown, which I thought was rather strange.  For some reason I didn't pick that up as a reference, perhaps because green seemed less strange to me than brown for a default display color.  As a child of the 70s and 80s, deeply rooted in the space age, earth tones did not appeal to me very much.)

 

All that said, I must have adjusted the knobs further at some point, for I have some vivid recollections of a few games having rich brown elements in them, which look distressingly wrong when emulated with an olive green tint.

 

Perhaps I adjusted the TV set with one of those Saturday morning test patterns, as I waited for the cartoon hour to start.  (I recall doing that quite a bit.)

 

It wouldn't be out of character for me to actually adjust the knobs to make the title screen green, then adjust them again during game play to "fix" the scenery to look properly.  (I recall doing that quite a bit too.)

 

This is part of the reason I use color #12 as "brown" in my own game, with the expectation that it is as so called, e.g., for tree trunks, earth, Snowmen twig arms, etc.

 

On 12/3/2022 at 8:18 AM, Walter Ives said:

Now say your game doesn't use much brown, but has a lot of sky, like Biplanes. If you're a 12-year old of the time, you know exactly what to do: reach over and adjust the tint control of your set until the sky is light blue. Duh.

I definitely remember the Triple Action Biplanes with a light blue sky.  It surprised me immensely when the emulator (and, to some extent, it's maker) tried to "convince" me that it was some bluish purple all along.  I'm not falling for it, I know better.

 

To this day, I find the original, "inaccurate" color palette of the jzIntv emulator to be closer to my childhood memories of the Intellivision actual colors, than the new, more technically accurate one.

 

The latter has some rather bizarre and garish tones in it, which do not look at all as I remember my games from way back then.

 

     dZ.

Edited December 5, 2022 by DZ-Jay

[mr_me]

I was twelve years old in the early 1980s, and I did adjust the colour controls on our one colour TV.  But I adjusted for normal television viewing, trying to get natural skin colours and did not readjust for Intellivision.  So the Intellivision looked how it looked.  The light blue sky did look light blue, I always described the titlescreen as a bit of a golden colour, but not brown.  Had no idea it was supposed to be brown.  The colours others are describing are more similar to what I remember and is what I expect to see.  In the late 1990s I got a trinitron television, and the sky in biplanes became a bit pinkish and the titlescreen more greenish, but I'm not going to readjust colours just for the Intellivision.

 

[mr_me]

On 12/3/2022 at 8:18 AM, Walter Ives said:

...

Technology was moving fast, and by 1979 advancing technology allowed more expensive televisions to be equipped with circuitry that gave them some ability to self-adjust for color (see

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqwG6AyXyY0,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FtpnmRYPy0).

But color TVs were expensive and families didn't replace them very often, so it took a while for the new technology to propagate.

...

I think for that self-adjust technology to work, the Intellivision would have to send colour settings data in its signal, which I don't think it did.

Edited December 6, 2022 by mr_me

[+DZ-Jay]

36 minutes ago, mr_me said:

I think for that self-adjust technology to work, the Intellivision would have to send colour settings data in its signal, which I don't think it did.

 
I do not think it was based on variations in color signal.  It’s more that the tolerances of analog components and manufacturing processes were varied or overly, er, tolerant.

 

Plus normal operational wear or diverse environmental conditions would affect the performance of the electronic components.

 

Post-manufacturing adjustment was considered cheaper and preferable than an expectation of perfect component or assembly accuracy, or ideal environmental conditions or usage patterns.

 

I remember adjusting my set using one of the pre-broadcast test patterns at some time, but never requiring to do so on every channel for every show, nor even every day.  Typically, you just “set it and forget it.”

 

In old American movies and television shows in which the popular cultural habits of the time are depicted, it would be common to show an affluent family having a “television technician” come and “install” and “tune” their set; while in more middle class households, the owner would typically do it himself, awkwardly or haphazardly.  These adjustments typically follow the purchase and installation of a new set.

 

That reflects my own personal recollections, such as they are, of the time.

 

Your mileage may vary, of course.

 

   dZ.

 

Edited December 6, 2022 by DZ-Jay

[JohnPCAE]

I could see the 10% tolerance on C33 causing some hue variation from unit to unit, especially with brown.

[IMBerzerk]

On 12/5/2022 at 10:17 AM, mr_me said:

I was twelve years old in the early 1980s, and I did adjust the colour controls on our one colour TV.  But I adjusted for normal television viewing, trying to get natural skin colours and did not readjust for Intellivision.  So the Intellivision looked how it looked.  The light blue sky did look light blue, I always described the titlescreen as a bit of a golden colour, but not brown.  Had no idea it was supposed to be brown.  The colours others are describing are more similar to what I remember and is what I expect to see.  In the late 1990s I got a trinitron television, and the sky in biplanes became a bit pinkish and the titlescreen more greenish, but I'm not going to readjust colours just for the Intellivision.

 

Same here.  We had an RCA tv that NO ONE but Dad was allowed to touch.  There was no way I was adjusting anything on it.  But what I don't get, if everyone posts that they saw Olive Green as brown, then wouldn't that mean the brown was Olive Green?  Sure the paperwork might say it was supposed to be brown, and you had to adjust the TV to get brown, but then the rest of the colors are off, and you were taking the TV out of proper adjustment.  

 

I think the colors were what we were meant to see on a CRT.  I couldn't imagine sitting there constantly adjusting the TV all the time.  In fact, I have and use a 1979 19" Sears Solid State for my Intellivision hookup. It has a button you pull to override the color adjustments and allow the chip to use default settings.  When you do that, the screen is Olive Brown.  That tells me we're supposed to see the color as that. 

[+DZ-Jay]

54 minutes ago, IMBerzerk said:

Same here.  We had an RCA tv that NO ONE but Dad was allowed to touch.  There was no way I was adjusting anything on it.  But what I don't get, if everyone posts that they saw Olive Green as brown, then wouldn't that mean the brown was Olive Green?  Sure the paperwork might say it was supposed to be brown, and you had to adjust the TV to get brown, but then the rest of the colors are off, and you were taking the TV out of proper adjustment.  

 

I think the colors were what we were meant to see on a CRT.  I couldn't imagine sitting there constantly adjusting the TV all the time.  In fact, I have and use a 1979 19" Sears Solid State for my Intellivision hookup. It has a button you pull to override the color adjustments and allow the chip to use default settings.  When you do that, the screen is Olive Brown.  That tells me we're supposed to see the color as that. 

I remember it both ways.  I know, I know, it’s inconsistent and probably faulty memories, but I have simultaneous impressions in my mind of seeing the tittle screen green, but seeing some background elements as brown.

 

I don’t know why or how that could be.  Perhaps I was ultra-OCD and adjust the settings per game or even per phase of the game (one setting for title screen, one setting for play-field).  I have a bit of a weird OCD vibe, but that really does not sound like something I would do.

 

The most likely reason is that I adjusted it one way, and it was green; then at some point I adjusted it differently and it was brown, and I just sort of merged both colors in my mind since the context is the same.

 

What I mean by that last bit is, for instance, if I had seen people’s skin tone green or dark pink when watching TV due to maladjustment of the colors, and then proceeded to adjust them correctly; I wouldn’t imprint a memory that suggested people had two skin colors.  Most likely I would just remember only one, and perhaps a vague memory of something pink or green, if anything at all.

 

Perhaps the same happen to me with the Intellivision.  On my TV I saw the title screen green at some point (and that made an impression due to it being a cool new shiny toy), then upon eventual adjustment, colors seemed normal and no new special memory was made.

 

It’s not as if I used to stare at the title screens for long when booting up the games anyway.

 

dZ.

Edited December 7, 2022 by DZ-Jay

[IMBerzerk]

4 hours ago, DZ-Jay said:

I remember it both ways.  I know, I know, it’s inconsistent and probably faulty memories, but I have simultaneous impressions in my mind of seeing the tittle screen green, but seeing some background elements as brown.

 

I don’t know why or how that could be.  Perhaps I was ultra-OCD and adjust the settings per game or even per phase of the game (one setting for title screen, one setting for play-field).  I have a bit of a weird OCD vibe, but that really does not sound like something I would do.

 

The most likely reason is that I adjusted it one way, and it was green; then at some point I adjusted it differently and it was brown, and I just sort of merged both colors in my mind since the context is the same.

 

What I mean by that last bit is, for instance, if I had seen people’s skin tone green or dark pink when watching TV due to maladjustment of the colors, and then proceeded to adjust them correctly; I wouldn’t imprint a memory that suggested people had two skin colors.  Most likely I would just remember only one, and perhaps a vague memory of something pink or green, if anything at all.

 

Perhaps the same happen to me with the Intellivision.  On my TV I saw the title screen green at some point (and that made an impression due to it being a cool new shiny toy), then upon eventual adjustment, colors seemed normal and no new special memory was made.

 

It’s not as if I used to stare at the title screens for long when booting up the games anyway.

 

dZ.

In my experience with colors, I used AD&D, it has all three "greens" right at the start of the game so you can see the difference.  Leave the title screen on for a few seconds and you think it looks green, start the game to the map screen and suddenly that green looks very brown with the green background and light green border.

 

So after leaving the map screen on for a out 10 seconds, reset the game and you'll see the title screen looks brown. 

 

I based my color palette for JzIntv  on that idea.  I wasn't interested in constantly adjusting the color of anything. 

[+DZ-Jay]

8 hours ago, IMBerzerk said:

In my experience with colors, I used AD&D, it has all three "greens" right at the start of the game so you can see the difference.  Leave the title screen on for a few seconds and you think it looks green, start the game to the map screen and suddenly that green looks very brown with the green background and light green border.

 

So after leaving the map screen on for a out 10 seconds, reset the game and you'll see the title screen looks brown. 

 

I based my color palette for JzIntv  on that idea.  I wasn't interested in constantly adjusting the color of anything. 

That may have been my experience, and relates to my faulty memories.  I sort of recall seeing brown on the games, but also green; and like I said, I did adjust my set, but didn't really do it often at all.

 

    dZ.

[+DZ-Jay]

Also, for what it's worth, I use brown for the Snowman's Arms on my game, and they've always looked like brown twigs to me -- on the emulator, my CRT, and my flat screen.

 

    dZ.

[Walter Ives]

On 12/6/2022 at 11:28 AM, mr_me said:

I think for that self-adjust technology to work, the Intellivision would have to send colour settings data in its signal, which I don't think it did.

Nope. The "colour settings data" is inherent in the video signal. The "self-adjust technology" works just fine for the Intellivision in that it reliably and repeatedly yields those yucky colors all y'all have been trying to emulate. Maine and Harrower could have gotten closer to the colors James wanted by increasing the size of the high-speed ROM in the color chip, but that would have required a bigger package and increased its cost and they saw no point in doing that given the TVs actually in homes in 1976, which is when they formulated the STIC architecture. (I'll leave the question why the color chip was in an 18-pin package with two no-connect pins as a solvable puzzle for all y'all to mull over.) It has been speculated elsewhere on this site that the PAL colors may be much closer to what was originally intended, based on the color names in technical documents. The suggestion was made that one might want to compare the number of bits in those ROMs with the number of bits in the NTSC color chip's internal ROM, but that hint apparently wasn't intriguing enough to drive anyone to drink.

 

WJI

[Walter Ives]

On 12/7/2022 at 1:02 PM, IMBerzerk said:

But what I don't get, if everyone posts that they saw Olive Green as brown, then wouldn't that mean the brown was Olive Green?  Sure the paperwork might say it was supposed to be brown, and you had to adjust the TV to get brown, but then the rest of the colors are off, and you were taking the TV out of proper adjustment.  I think the colors were what we were meant to see on a CRT.  I couldn't imagine sitting there constantly adjusting the TV all the time.  In fact, I have and use a 1979 19" Sears Solid State for my Intellivision hookup. It has a button you pull to override the color adjustments and allow the chip to use default settings.  When you do that, the screen is Olive Brown.  That tells me we're supposed to see the color as that. 

Nope. Ignore the TV default color settings—they didn't exist on vast majority of sets in common use when Harrower and Maine began designing the chip set in 1976. At the time users generally understood that the "proper adjustment" of their TV was the settings of the Hue/Saturation/Luminance/Contrast/Sharpness/Horizontal Position/Vertical Position and whatever other controls their television set may have had to the positions that gave them what in their opinion was the best looking picture for the particular program material they were watching at the time. It was Mattel's opinion, at least as evidenced by how its representatives set the controls for CES, Toy Fair and presentations, that for most cartridges the controls should be adjusted so that the title screens were a beautiful, rich brown. That's what the early programmers did too.

 

But technology kept moving forward. When the Intellivision III was designed in 1982 it addressed the issue by replacing the color ROM with a color RAM that stored colors as (Y, Cr, Cb), thereby providing more color resolution than one could discern. It doubled the size of the active palette (from 16 to 32) by giving the background and the objects their own separate color spaces. On reset the color RAM was initialized with values matching the colors James originally intended when the color controls were in their default positions, and the existing cartridges used these. New cartridges could overwrite those values to specify their own colors. Exceptionally masochistic programmers could get even more colors by taking advantage of the fact that the color registers were writeable during active picture, which capability was demonstrated by re-creating Finney's fantastic Adventures of TRON title screen.

 

WJI