barfood wrote: ↑Sat Jan 09, 2021 6:39 pm
Thanks for your efforts, elvis!
No problems, glad to be able to contribute in my own small way.
barfood wrote: ↑Sat Jan 09, 2021 6:39 pmSo if I understand your results right, the "NES classic" palette is the closest to matching the AV Famicom?
I must stress that it's almost impossible to determine a "best" palette, due entirely to the huge amount of variability involved. The NES spits out signals that didn't perfectly match any broadcast standard old or new, and the resulting images seen by the viewer are dependent on NTSC and PAL decoding chips and circuits in an era where "standards" either didn't exist, or were considered entirely optional by display manufacturers.
Since the late 80s things have gotten a lot better when it comes to colour science and colour standards. But in the early days of the NES, it really was the wild west, both on Nintendo's hardware and on display technology.
With all that in mind, using my very old PVM D20L5A which very likely has fading phosphors and capacitors in need of replacing, and when it was calibrated as close as possible to Rec601 standards, the MiSTer FPGA + NES Classic palette measured with the lowest Delta E 2000 (objectively measured level of error with respect to human colour perception using a colorimeter) compared to my also aging AV Famicom, also with aging capacitors. That is, objectively, the only thing I can say without bias.
What I do want to do is repeat the entire test on other displays to see if the outcome is similar. That means various domestic CRTs with newer circuitry (I've got some post-2000 model CRTs I can test), as well as using known trusted devices like Mike Chi's RetroTink (as I know Mike uses the Rec601 colour space in all of his hardware) onto a screen I trust, such as a calibrated LG OLED. But again, none of that will allow me to say what is the "best" palette, again due to a complete lack of standards of the era.
barfood wrote: ↑Sat Jan 09, 2021 6:39 pm
I never gave too much thought to the NES classic palette since it wasn't made by a community member.
To my knowledge the NES Classic palette was digitally ripped from Nintendo's platform by FirebrandX:
http://www.firebrandx.com/nespalette.html
I don't know anything about Nintendo's development methods (they're an extremely secretive company), but subjectively speaking I've always been impressed at their commitment to maintain a certain level of consistency when it comes to the look and feel of their old software. Doing things like re-timing PAL versions of their popular games so gameplay and audio don't suffer (NTSC Super Mario Bros and PAL Super Mario Bros are *much* closer than NTSC/PAL Sonic The Hedgehog, for example), or putting incredible effort in to in-house written emulators, whether that was emulating N64 Ocarina of Time on the GameCube for the re-release, or the colour palettes of the NES on the Wii Virtual Console.
I was pleasantly surprised by what I discovered when I did this experiment. I didn't go into it with any preconceptions (I literally started the project to answer the question for myself, instead of going by hearsay on the Internet). But as above, I still want to repeat the experiment several more times to see how different the results will be on different hardware outside of just a single PVM, which can't objectively be considered the source of truth.