What made the NES so interesting?

* As evidenced by the fact that the (RGB-based) Nintendo VS. System has a different palette than later emulation releases, even at the time Nintendo wasn't sure of the "correct" RGB palette (or has since come around and changed their mind about what that should be).

* There wasn't really any sort of standard devkit. Different developers, different games, different artists used different hardware and software tools to draw their graphics. Nintendo was notoriously crappy to third-party developers during the Famicom years, and Western developers in particular had little institutional support from them. Even if you had the correct palette that Nintendo was using between 1988 and 1991, that's not necessarily what Rare was using in 1990, or what Square was using in 1987, or...

* The Famicom was released in 1983, and development on it began in 1982. There was no Amiga, no Atari ST, no X68000, no VGA, no mainstream computers really capable of general purpose graphics editing. Developers often had to come up with bespoke systems for editing graphics at the time, including bespoke hardware - and it's entirely possible these bespoke systems used a similar non-RGB design as the Famicom, or even the same PPU, or were even just editing programs on a Famicom with some kind of serial-out hacked in.

* Philosophically speaking, the artists were aware that they were producing graphics for the Famicom/NES. That is, they weren't looking at whatever RGB output they had as the definitive version, but just as a rough guideline for how the image would appear on TVs. Given that, whatever RGB the devkit might've been spitting out isn't "definitive" in the sense of how the artist intended anyone to see it.

* I don't really trust Nintendo to make any extra effort to provide an "authentic" experience in their re-releases: witness, for instance, the low quality of the N64 emulation in the Switch Online Expansion Pack they just put out. The actual people who did the art may be gone or uninvolved in the re-releases; just because they own the copyright I don't think whatever Nintendo slaps together really represents the intent of the artists themselves, in the same way that I don't think, say, the release of Go Set a Watchman says anything about the intent of Harper Lee.

We have seen photos featuring people using nice, pro or broadcast grade CRT displays. Given the lack of an RGB authority, and the limited number of colors, it is likely each group just used whatever references that made sense to them.

And regions. PAL, SECAM, other variants all added noise.

I'll bet a standard consumer grade TV with RF was a small part of many dev processes too. Just a check on effects and or particularly troublesome color combinations. The pro or broadcast grade displays would often render those better than one might expect, but your average TV would likely display a hopefully interesting blur...

RGB images suggest this check on a basic RF TV because some of the pixel art choices may have been different, given better display signals were an option.

For me personally, viewing an NES on a better quality composite display works best for me. Personal preference, and that is due to having composite capable displays early on. I used composite more than anything else. But all that said, the NES RF modulator was respectable. Worked better than many did.

Often, the design choice was a long cable to the TV.

I had a few systems that parked the modulator right next to the signal input on the TV. TI Home computer had a huge one, but it really was great. I used it for many different systems. There was a modulator for PS1 that you could use with a very short connection. And the NES.

RF done that way worked well enough.

This is why we joked NTSC meant Never The Same Color.

The last thing you wanted to see in NTSC was bright red because you'd continue to see it smear for at least 1/4 of the screen to the right. NTSC "Safe" red wasn't really red. Run a broadcast safe filter on 255,0,0 and see how far off it goes. Should be somewhere around 180,0,0 IIRC. The days of looking at vectorscope to see the red point shoot off while everything else was much closer. When it became easier to get digital images to tape, we'd have to adjust the chroma down on the TBC to bring it back into legal limits which would mean the rest of the other colors would get squashed when the client didn't work in NTSC safe color palletes.

I cannot complain enough, this is a simple web page. there is absolutely no reason i cannot capture a static image of it.

beyond that, i sort of enjoyed a deeper dive, but the subject matter was relatively uninteresting to me. Technology used to have to be bent to the will of the group programming for it, and i'm sure with enough time and the lack of a release schedule from the three big CPU manufacturers, we'd have amazing results with x86 and Arm now, too. But it was a different time, and i do appreciate history.

Sure do wish i could save the site as a .png, though.