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PAL's not so bad...


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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...

 

1373515826_ScreenShot2022-05-10at2_13_39am.thumb.png.bc52c8b4d43d8d1c0db5e04048532419.png

 

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...

 

np.thumb.png.3a228d20f87376365a534b81cf5d0935.png

 

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 by Andrew Davie
typo
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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
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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. :) 

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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. 

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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

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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.

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