NES colors are a sticky wicket due to the issue of palette variation, but he was definitely purple on a typical home setup. Easiest way to verify is by looking at these shots from Nintendo Power.
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The game being from 1989 I’m assuming all artwork was laboriously coded in pixel by pixel. That means they where looking at it all through a monitor with a color LUT and never seeing the raw sprites like we can today. (As far as I know.) The Joker is a lighter pinkish purple in the game, so I would be surprised if Batman was dark purple. Yet the NES did have a limited color palette…
@hunterk good find. Here is a video of someone playing on a crt. It’s not great quality but to my eye Batman looks a little more bluish than the magazine.
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I watched a little of the video, it’s either the camera or TV that’s pushing the blue a little harder. I can see some purple-ness to Batman in the video, alot of the colors seem off to be honest. Look at the HUD up at the top, the whole this is basically blue in the video. (Which is most certainly not right, so yeah either his camera or CRT is pushing blue hard.)
I do w/e with the color when I’m playing games anyway. But yeah he “should” be purple in that game, makes more sense too use the LUT and make him blue though, lol.
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I also just remember him being purple from playing the game as a kid 
Nevertheless, there is the ongoing question of whether the sprites were designed around cooler japanese NTSC standards, etc. (the usual “artist’s intention” subjective b.s.), not to mention differences in calibration, manufacturers’ differences, etc.
Just make it look how you think it should and you’ll be in good shape 
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Those shots from Nintendo power are great 
I also remember him being purplish.
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Here is a little more fun. This flyer for the game at the time shows our batty boy in blue, but the back of the box has him purple. (Which I would side on being the intended color.) None of it matters but it’s fun to speculate as I have no screen grabs from my 1989 memories.
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That flyer is interesting as it looks like they took a picture of a CRT running the game and then layered the rest of the image over it.
Also colors should be a little off in the flyer as it was most likely in a magazine and magazines to my knowledge you a different color (range? CMYK I think) then TV, and monitors.
The Mega Bezel is updated to V2020-05-18
Changes:
- By God, Cropping is finally working on all shaders except the LCD shader and Royale!
- It had nothing at all to do with guest-venom, it was all in how I was dealing with the cropped coordinates
- I’m not sure I’m going to do it on the lcd shader as it’s using an odd function I haven’t seen before texelFetchOffset, and may not add much value anyway * I’m still planning to do Royale, but I have to venture into the depths of the include chain
- Post-CRT scanlines, these are similar to the resolution independent scanlines, but pulled from crt-torridgristle, brightness is automatically boosted when these are on so brightness is maintained
- New Guest-Venom HD preset whch uses the Post-CRT scanlines
- Black Level is fixed
- New Parameter to reduce the vertical resolution, useful for getting sort of realish scanlines on high res content [SCANLINES] Core Res Mult (Inv), this could be used if you have increased the core res. Note that this doesn’t currently play well with the cropping.
- You probably need to update your presets
Cropping Example: Original no Cropping
Negative Crop
Negative Black Level
Negative Crop Brightness
MDapt with the most relaxed setting
HD Preset & Post CRT Scanlines
Vertical Downres
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That’s correct. CMYK has a limited range. However, this should also apply to boxes as well since they get printed just like magazines. So, if a box can display a certain color, so can a magazine.
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Ohh thought the second image was the otherside of the flyer, my bad.
Amazing! I have a question regarding the Post-CRT scanlines. Since certain cores like PSX change resolution depending on content (such as bios), is it worth using this setting even if i am using the native core res?
Also, do they look any different than the standard scanlines?
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If the crt shader has visible scanlines, then you won’t want to add the extra scanlines on top as you will get artifacts where the extra scanlines go on top of the others.
The scanlines are straight across, with no curvature to avoid artifacts, they don’t have any scanline dynamics (like variable thickness). At 4k I find 480p content to look good with guest venom and interlace mode 0, but if you set it to interlace mode 3 the scanlines disappear and then you can add on the post-crt scanlines
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Wow… not only the bottom cropping/overscan option is fixed, you also added the fixed resolution scanlines option i asked for. Both in the same update.
Talk about Hyperspace delivering the goods.
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Holy buckets! Did you just decide to go without sleep for a couple days? Amazing updates.
Not that it compares, but…
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Mmmmmmmmmm sort of?
Same as screens can vary wildly in color representation, print can too:
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Screens themselves have different appearances due to the type of glass, surface glossiness, and the like; paper has different color, reflectivity, and ink absorption, so thick cardstock like a game box will look different from thinner, more translucent magazine stock even with the same inks, including the varnish that makes 'em shiny.
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Both phosphors and liquid crystals differ in brightness and persistence depending on how they’re made; each color of ink (including black) can look different depending on brand, age, and even viscosity of the mix due to environmental factors during print.
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Beam convergence and TVL matter for clarity and color fidelity in finer details; printing plate registration (alignment) tolerances and different dot densities can affect fine details similarly.
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Some LCDs use more than just three colors, adding yellow or white to get better color fidelity. Large print runs are likely to add more inks for better color and clarity – half-density colors like grey, intermediates like orange and green, “spot colors” for metallics, neons, and brand-specific colors.
Of course, this all assumes the color profiles are kept consistent through each stage of production, a lofty goal that has broken stronger hearts than ours. Considering that I’ve seen game magazines with screenshots where the green and blue were reversed (to be fair, that’s from an ancient EGM) or where the screenshots look different across two pages on the same spread, I’d say it’s a small miracle if the colors between magazine and box actually do match!
tl;dr: Matching gamuts for magazine and box print? Maybe possibly approximately yes-ish depending on one’s tolerances, just like with monitors.
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I just fired up Batman on my composite NES and CRT and he’s definitely purple, but it’s a royal purple rather than lavender. I tried to take a picture, but my camera made him look much bluer than reality >.<
/off-topic
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@HyperspaceMadness Fantastic. I love having the CRT lines on higher resolutions. My only suggesting would be adding an option for opacity on the dark lines if possible. If I could dim or blur the lines a little I could get away with not have integer scaling on and have a larger image. It looks great on Vagrant Story upscaled 4x.
@hunterk Thank you for looking it up. I’m jealous and need to get a CRT. I opened a bunch of games with blue skies and many are just blue, but some have a purplish shade. Was that intentional or where the displays they developed on showing a different shade of blue? It’s hard to imagine why Super Mario Brother’s would have a blue sky in world 1-1. The back of the boxes usually show blue skies but that’s all marketing material that is prone to post adjustment. Again, it’s fun to speculate.
Thanks for the suggestion! I had thought about this too, but I’m concerned about hitting the parameter limit (this is a regular battle to keep under the parameter limit as stuff is added). I do think it’s a good idea though, so I’ll see what I can do. If we had an opacity value for it, then we could have default value for the number of scanlines like 240.
Yeah, it’s hard to say. I’ll try to fire up some SMB1 and take a look. I’ve always thought of it as blue, but it’s a surprisingly contentious topic, and there’s some weird old quote from Miyamoto saying:
“At that time, you could only have about 3 colors for the blue sky, on the Family Computer. It took me a while to decide which one I would use, and eventually I picked the purplish one. I felt that purple had the depth of nature. I was really into that.”
For Zelda II, our old pal Nintendo Power has it as blue, but it sure looks to be the same shade as the SMB1 sky in your pic, and the grass looks bluer than it probably should in the NP shots, so who knows.
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First, thanks for this incredible shader HyperspaceMadness, it’s wonderful… I came here to ask if it is possible to add an option to do an automatic “on the fly” crop overscan, there are a lot of games which doesn’t scale well, leaving black bars, I know we can change it per game, but Zelda II for example has black bars in the overworld and don’t have it in other areas, I don’t now if such thing would be possible, but it doens’t hurt to ask.
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