The NES had an inconsistent colour palette because of its analog signal and CRT TVs. Different NESes and different TVs would produce different results. For an example of this, just look at the Castlevania level 2 colour debate--the background is variably bright red, dark red, or dark purple.
There is no "canonical" or "correct" colour palette. Download this palette for free as a PNG, PAl, ASE, TXT, GPL or HEX file. The NES has a limited selection of color outputs.
A 6-bit value in the palette memory area corresponds to one of 64 outputs. The emphasis bits of the PPUMASK register ($2001) provide an additional color modifier. For more information on how the colors are generated on an NTSC NES, see: NTSC video.
For. NES Palette The Nintendo wasn't sophisticated enough to use the new color systems of today. No alpha channels or 24-bit color to work with, no 8-bit palette, not even RGB settings.
On the NES you can work with a total of 64 pre-set colors (56 of which are unique), and you can only show 25 on the screen at one time (under normal circumstances). Even with these limitations, some visually striking games were released on the console. Rather than just discussing the most visually advanced games on the NES, today we're specifically looking at the most well.
To make matters worse, even if there were a single correct decoding method, several of the NES' colors are actually impossible to represent accurately in the RGB colorspace. The color of the sky in Super Mario Bros., for example, usually comes out looking a bit purple in RGB palettes because the blue component is way out of range. The NES system design acknowledges this and has two different sets of palettes.
You may have noticed that the first color in each of the BG palettes is the same, as is the first color for all the FG palettes. The PVM was set to D93 color temp for this final version. Palette file link: PVM Style D93 (FBX) "Composite Direct (FBX)" This is a pure, unmodified direct-capture of the composite output of the front-loader NTSC NES.
It's intended for posterity and is a good all. Here's the NES's complete palette. these were all the colors available to use in NES games.
54 different shades total, though those on the far right are so similar, they're typically considered one color I didn't know until about a week ago that the NES could only do so many colors, and not much variety either. but yeah, looking at this, one can understand why exactly mega man is blue, there. Everybody knows the NES doesn't output RGB, and it's not by coincidence NTSC stands for never the same color (I know it doesn't, chill) - in practice, defining an RGB palette for the NES is a matter of taste and opinion.
But that doesn't cut it for me. I'm trying to figure out which palette was the "intended" one.