What made the NES so interesting?

The NES colors are nice but not sure how "designed" it was - to get colors from an NTSC or PAL signal is phase shifting, so if the colors are in rainbow order (which they are) then each color is simply a phase shift of some amount and the "design" is which amount of phase shift. I was always curious why they left 8 colors black and why black and white was duplicated in the palette, though.

Something like the C64 which used a "resistor bank" to pick the colors actually had thought into the individual choices of each color.

What NES got very right IMHO was:

- More than 16 colors

- Adequate horizontal resolution but not caring about the maximum since the point wasn't to display text (256 pixels, not 160 or 320)

- 2 bits per pixel with just enough palettes to be useful - no 1bpp graphics.

- 64 sprites - so many sprites even if they were 8x8

- Hardware scrolling and multiple nametable support

A lot of the magic in the NES was all the sprites - 64 is a lot for the hardware at the time, the fact they had the same resolution as the nametable, and easy support for scrolling. Also the CPU was kinda fast - 1.79MHz is speedy for a 6502 CPU.

If you're aligned to the axes of the NTSC system you're going to form a grid on intensity, hue and saturation. There's almost no way to make somebody a better colorist than to take away their RGB sliders and give them something more like HSV. You get ideas like complementary and analogous colors "for free". As atrocious as NTSC was it's representation of color was parsimonious of bandwidth as well as compatible with black and white.

I think it's got something to do with the eye being much more sensitive to green but RGB cubes wind up terribly unbalanced and "meaningless" in my way of thinking whereas the Nintendo colors are "meaningful" in that they are aligned with human perception. (Never seen anybody else do it but I run my Hue, Sengled and LIFX lights green on hot summer days to add less heat to the house... I figure the strange color rendition is not so bad because I'm either supplementing outside light from the windows or if is really hot the windows are covered with space blankets and I don't care how strange of a scene it is.)

> The NES is in some sense a composite-only system. While there is an RGB mod, it's quite invasive[...]

This is something that a lot of even very plugged into retrogaming people don't really get about the NES and RGB mods. I think it's very counterintuitive for people now that there is no part of the system that operates in actual 'color' information. The NES' video output is composite from start to finish[1], with palette entries corresponding to approximate output frequencies for the color subcarrier.

So there is no canonical palette for the NES - the colors produced by games varied by region, a little bit by unit, and especially because NTSC had trouble with stable color even by TV.

So people imagine that RGB or HDMI mods of the NES are somehow tapping into a missing layer of raw color information, but what it's actually doing is intercepting communications with the PPU and modelling (on an fpga) an extra PPU that does operate in RGB, and then constructing a new video signal from that.

And then you have to pick a palette, because there isn't just one.

I have an RGB modded NES (a US toploader) but I doubt I will ever buy or make another one. At this point I think it's better to just use an upscaler, which will produce no less authentic a picture. The main benefit imo of the rgb mod is that there's less interference so the picture is clearer, even if you just output reconstructed composite from it.

[1] There is actually a model of NES PPU that outputs RGB, it was used in the PlayChoice arcade machines (which generally used RGB monitors, not composite) and it has a palette that most people agree is ugly as sin.

You're more right than you realize, because the console version is the original; the arcade version was the port.

I love nes