+Andrew Davie Posted May 9, 2022 Share Posted May 9, 2022 (edited) For some reason, over the years, I've accepted the idea that PAL has worse colours than NTSC - at least in terms of the '2600. After all, NTSC has 128 unique colours and PAL has only 104, or so I've read. And this viewpoint is reinforced by somewhat dubious PAL colour usage of many games (at least the ones I've seen). When I look at the colour charts on @Random Terrain's site - which I use regularly as they're an easy visualisation, I see this... And yes, that certainly does emphasise how much worse the colour selections are in PAL-land. But as an aside here, I needed to have both PAL and NTSC colour eqivalents so that I could draw a "rainbow" sort of spread in my current game. So normally I used a table-lookup for this, which is probably what I'll still do. But the tables reused a lot of colours and I did't have a good visualisation of what was available. So I took the above, and manually rearranged the PAL rows into what looks to me like the best equivalent. I know the above colour set isn't perfect, but nonetheless using that as a base, I ended up with the following... You can see that I've used "2" twice, and "4" thrice, but other than that concession the PAL colour is actually pretty good! It just breaks my preconception that actually you're going to get much worse colours in a PAL game. The above tends to suggest that this is not actually the case, and with care you can get very similar-looking visuals. And, that's been my experience in my current bit of work. It's interesting how terrible the first image makes PAL look. And how much difference just rearranging the rows (and adding a few duplicates) makes. Edited May 9, 2022 by Andrew Davie typo 12 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KevKelley Posted May 9, 2022 Share Posted May 9, 2022 When you place them side by side like the way you have it really does go to show how close they really are. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
waynel Posted May 10, 2022 Share Posted May 10, 2022 As an old TV guy, I'll leave this bit of industrial humor here. Most people on the internet know the first one, but I never see the other two: NTSC: Never The Same Color PAL: Picture At Last SECAM: System Essentially Contrary to the American Method 2 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted May 10, 2022 Author Share Posted May 10, 2022 (edited) 12 minutes ago, Reaperducer said: As an old TV guy, You might find my Narrow Bandwidth Television forum interesting! https://www.taswegian.com/NBTV/forum/ Edited May 10, 2022 by Andrew Davie 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Jentzsch Posted May 10, 2022 Share Posted May 10, 2022 29 minutes ago, Reaperducer said: As an old TV guy, I'll leave this bit of industrial humor here. Most people on the internet know the first one, but I never see the other two: NTSC: Never The Same Color PAL: Picture At Last SECAM: System Essentially Contrary to the American Method Didn't know the PAL one. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KevKelley Posted May 10, 2022 Share Posted May 10, 2022 5 hours ago, Reaperducer said: As an old TV guy, I'll leave this bit of industrial humor here. Most people on the internet know the first one, but I never see the other two: NTSC: Never The Same Color PAL: Picture At Last SECAM: System Essentially Contrary to the American Method My grandfather was a television repair man (and my father-in-law did so in college). I wonder if they heard these before. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Jentzsch Posted May 10, 2022 Share Posted May 10, 2022 (edited) At least NTSC is very popular. BTW: I always ordered my PAL palettes like this (use B&W or fire button). ColorTest (PAL60).zip Edited May 10, 2022 by Thomas Jentzsch 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Random Terrain Posted May 15, 2022 Share Posted May 15, 2022 Have you clicked on the "Rearranged PAL Chart" button here: https://www.randomterrain.com/atari-2600-memories-tia-color-charts.html#ntsc_pal_color_conversion 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+SvOlli Posted May 16, 2022 Share Posted May 16, 2022 I did a lightning talk once about a plasma demo effect done on the 2600, where I also explained the topic of circumventing the shortcomings of the PAL color palette. I also did something else: since I did a 256 bytes palette for "easy access", I reordered the 16 values of brightness to getting from dark to bright and bright again: 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, a, c, e, e, c, a, 8, 6, 4, 2, 0. This way cycling through the colors looks even better than using the original NTSC palette. The talk is available here: https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6563_-_en_-_saal_g_-_201412281245_-_lightning_talks_day_2_-_gedsic#t=1260 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ecernosoft Posted May 22, 2022 Share Posted May 22, 2022 On 5/10/2022 at 10:19 AM, Reaperducer said: As an old TV guy, I'll leave this bit of industrial humor here. Most people on the internet know the first one, but I never see the other two: NTSC: Never The Same Color PAL: Picture At Last SECAM: System Essentially Contrary to the American Method PAL is Phase alternating line. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
waynel Posted June 26, 2022 Share Posted June 26, 2022 On 5/22/2022 at 2:53 PM, Ecernosoft said: PAL is Phase alternating line. Yes, I know that. "Picture at Last" is a joke, like the other items in the list. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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