Pixeltao CRT NES Palette

This palette was originally released in 2021 and is the culmination of 5 years of fine tuning.

Pixeltao CRT is an attempt to express what the colors of the NES would have been if they were natively outputted in RGB and retained the color balance of the original composite signal (as opposed to the PlayChoice-10, where color balance is entirely different from what's outputted on a NES).

This palette doesn't try to reproduce the exact colors generated by the PPU's composite signal. Instead, the approach here was to make it look like if your NES had been upgraded to RGB and given that more vibrant look. Akin to the difference you get when you change your SNES/Genesis composite cable for RGB or YPbPr cables.

This palette wasn't created using any conversion algorithm from YIQ to RGB, or any capture tool. It was created by hand and tweaked by testing the output of many games on different displays.

When creating this palettes, aside from retaining some authenticity, 2 criteria were very important to me:

First, I intended to calibrate it in a way that it features the best possible hue distribution, even better than what's obtained on original hardware where a lot of the yellow/orange hues come out as greenish.

Second, I wanted it to look great on CRTs. I made sure that, even though its colors look vivid, lightness and saturation are kept within a certain range to avoid harsh contrasts.

Note:
Pictures shown are displayed on a broadcast monitor (Sony BVM-A20F1U).