Awww that’s a bummer really
But thanks for looking into it hunterk!
Well I have been experimenting with different shaders the last couple of days and I quite like the result which I posted above and when I play all my games with this specific shader combination and values it feels so damn right.
So while I can’t have Firebrandx’s palette, I still got the picture quality the way I want it and the colors better.
I’m still gonna use puNES though, it’s always good to have 2 good Famicom/Famicom Disk System emulators
Couldn’t someone write a shader that takes the raw chroma/level/emphasis output (from the “raw” palette option in Nestopia that was added for GTU-Famicom), and outputs the actual colors based on a LUT texture for the palette?
FirebrandX’s palettes have been added as core options in both FCEUmm and Nestopia cores, as well as the Sony CXA2025AS US and PAL palettes from puNES.
The pull request for Nestopia is still pending but after it’s merged the changes will show up in the buildbot.
This looks great, thanks!
I’m not yet convinced that either of these are the “ideal” NES palette but they do look better than anything else currently offered in RetroArch.
I played through Castlevania III and Unsaturated-V5 looked really good there.
Some of the colors in YUV-V3 looked overly bright, like the wrong colorspace was being used.
I think that we will actually need wide gamut displays and a totally new palette that would look very desaturated on an sRGB display to show accurate NES colors.
[QUOTE=Tatsuya79;39378]Nice, thank you!
I like unsaturated.
The YUV one looks really similar to canonical I was using. No difference in some SMB, batman screenshots I took.[/QUOTE]It seems to depend on the game. It’s the darker colors where the differences are most noticeable.
FBX’s methodology at least takes out any subjectivity. He plugged a toaster NES into an xrgb-mini via composite and then ran a homebrew ROM that cycles through palette colors. He used an HDMI capture device on that output and then used photoshop to average the whole-screen color and then sampled that average. There’s never going to be a palette that looks “right” with respect to each person’s experience/memory/TV, so I think going with an objectively consistent process is the next best thing.
From this palette, you should be able to apply a consistent transform (e.g., increase contrast by X, reduce green saturation by Y) across the entire palette to get something that matches what you want/remember.
[QUOTE=hunterk;39411]FBX’s methodology at least takes out any subjectivity. He plugged a toaster NES into an xrgb-mini via composite and then ran a homebrew ROM that cycles through palette colors. He used an HDMI capture device on that output and then used photoshop to average the whole-screen color and then sampled that average. There’s never going to be a palette that looks “right” with respect to each person’s experience/memory/TV, so I think going with an objectively consistent process is the next best thing.[/quote]Well it still depends on how the xrgb-mini is decoding the signal and converting the colorspace.
It also sounded like both palettes were manually tweaked a bit too.
I’m not saying it isn’t a good palette, but I’m not sure it’s as definitive/objective as some people are claiming.
If I reduce chroma to 0 on my TV, I don’t get a uniform luminance across either palette like you’re supposed to.
bah, yeah, you’re right, he started manually correcting things after v1, which makes it no more objective than any of the others floating around, IMO.
One mark of a good NES palette is whether Thevros in Dragon Warrior 4 are purple. They are supposed to be purple, not blue. Not only were they purple on every TV I played Dragon Warrior 4 on as a kid, but they are also purple in the DS and Playstation versions of Dragon Quest 4. MANY palettes are completely incorrect with that palette entry. It’s not some minor shift. It’s a completely different color. The same palette entry is used for Troglodytes’ tongues, which are also supposed to be purple.
[QUOTE=larch1991;39420]Well it still depends on how the xrgb-mini is decoding the signal and converting the colorspace.
It also sounded like both palettes were manually tweaked a bit too.
I’m not saying it isn’t a good palette, but I’m not sure it’s as definitive/objective as some people are claiming.
If I reduce chroma to 0 on my TV, I don’t get a uniform luminance across either palette like you’re supposed to.
To display this at the correct saturation, you need to use a wide gamut display.[/QUOTE]
If I could shed some light on a few things about both Unsaturated-V5 and YUV-V3:
Unsaturated-V5 is meant to mimic the original contrast of the composite output, not the internally generated colors, so it won’t pass any sort of luminance uniformity test. It was never meant nor designed to pass such tests. Also the manual adjustments I made were mathematical in nature because I found the XRGB was shifting the spectrum towards green by an equal amount on the affected color entries. The corrections maintained the intended brightness and saturation, and merely subtracted the green shift. The end result is my personal favorite palette to use both on my RGB-modded NES and in emulation.
As for the YUV-V3, it is nearly identical to the “natural” palette originally offered on NESRGB boards, and is taken from Nestopia’s YUV palette (which is why I call it YUV-V3). There are only 4 entries unique to the YUV-V3 palette versus the original taken from Nestopia, and they are all in the dark green/cyan color area. So any sort of issue you would have with YUV-V3, you would 99% likely also have with the original version. YUV-V3 was merely offered as a small fix to an otherwise pretty decent palette that most people preferred on their NESRGB boards.
Had to check this out for myself, and it very definitely is purple on my Unsaturated-V5 palette. That is strange how some web sites have it looking blue on their sprite grabs. Here’s the Troglodyte with Unsaturated-V5:
[QUOTE=FBX;40744]Had to check this out for myself, and it very definitely is purple on my Unsaturated-V5 palette. That is strange how some web sites have it looking blue on their sprite grabs. Here’s the Troglodyte with Unsaturated-V5:
[/QUOTE]
Nice! Yeah, it’s a plague. Lots of palettes have the wrong color for that palette entry. I’m glad yours gets it right. The common one that also gets it right is Nestopia’s “consumer” palette.
He just released the new Unsaturated V6 recently, and only changed the cyan colors. He also updated his XRGB-Mini firmware to have more color balance. For some reason, he made YUV-V3 obsolete just now.
Yes, I released the final version 6 as I had an opportunity to revisit the direct-capture method with better results. The cyans are now direct-captured along with the rest of the palette, and it was the last nagging issue I wanted to address.
YUV-V3 support was discontinued for a few reasons: 1. I never use it. 2. Unsaturated was meant to replace it. 3. If you prefer YUV, there’s no reason to bother with upgrading to Unsaturated-V6 anyway.
Got a new favourite (that’s a short call between it and Unsaturated but…), NESCAP palette from here.
It’s something quite close to the new unsaturated-v7/final palette.
The slight difference is that FirebrandX tried to saturate / push the colors a bit while RGBSource stayed really close to the somewhat dull NES colors on a CRT.
NESCAP makes dark backgrounds a bit darker compared to the sprites and works well in my setup with a CRT Shader already boosting the luminance a bit, so see for yourself which one you prefer.
You can test any palette by renaming it custom.pal and copy it into retroarch/system folder, then select “custom” in Nestopia core options.
Thanks for the headsup, NESCAP looks really nice. I made a request to add it as a baked in option and update unsaturated on the Nestopia core’s git issues.
But thanks for looking into it hunterk!
The common one that also gets it right is Nestopia’s “consumer” palette.
