Color palettes
Below is a selection of well known color palettes, downloadable in different formats.
16 colors
4-bit RGBI (CGA)
Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) was a graphics card released in 1981 for the IBM PC.
While its common 320×200 graphics mode could display only 4 colors at once from restricted palettes (each with a low-intensity and high-intensity mode), it used internally a 4-bit color system which allowed 16 different colors, and in text-mode it was possible to produce all 16.
Below are all the possible 16 colors in CGA 4-bit RGBI system, it uses 1 bit for each primary color (Red, Green Blue) and the last bit is used as a selector for brightness (Intensity).
This palette was also later used as the default 16-color palette for the later EGA card (so it might also sometimes be considered as "the EGA palette", despite EGA allowing other colors).
Arne's Palette
Arne designed his Generic 16 color palette as a practical game palette, it's one of the first modern 16 colors palettes at gained popularity in pixel art circles.
It includes darker colors with both warm and cool options, so black-backgrounds can still have detailed foregrounds and shading, it tries to be more functional.
PICO-8 palette
The palette of the PICO-8 fantasy console is one of the most well known modern 16 color palettes.
It's very functional but also has a more candy-like, playful selection of colors. It's popular for tiny games, pixel-art experiments, and artists that look for a retro but vivid style.
32 colors
DAWNBRINGER
This palette was created by DawnBringer, a user on the Pixel Joint forums.
It has become a very popular all-purpose pixel-art palette widely used in pixel artist communities. It has a recognizable “retro but not hardware-specific” look.
Endesga 32
Endesga-32 / EDG32 is another popular palette in pixel art circles. It was originally created for NYKRA, but it was made very popular for indie projects (having its own category/tag in itch.io).
64 colors
6-bit RGB (EGA range)
The IBM EGA allowed for 64 possible colors, made from 2 bits per RGB channel. However, they could normally show up to 16 colors at once, selected from those 64 (often the 16 colors in the CGA palette were used as the default).
Note that the bits in EGA are distributed in the format rgbRGB, where the last 3 bits (RGB) are the most significant digits for the respective color and the first 3 bits (rgb) are the least significative. This results in a 8x8 matrix with the 8 hues from CGA overlapping.
Resurrect 64
This is a popular 64 color palette created by Kerrie Lake.
It's cozy, colorful but not painfully neon. It gives enough colors for full game visuals, offering more versatility while still restricting the gamut enough for it to look unified.
256 colors
VGA Palette
This is the standard VGA 256-color palette: the first 16 EGA-style colors, 16 grays, nine hue cycles, and the trailing black entries.
Doom palette
Doom stores its palette in the PLAYPAL lump, containing 256 indexed entries.
In the game, based on the lighting or the distance fog, the colors might be mapped to darker equivalents within the palette (resulting in 33 "COLORMAP" mappings, 32 for light levels plus an extra one for invulnerability), so this palette was designed to have a few different color "ramps" that scale in brightness.
Note that there are some duplicates in the palette, left out at the limits of some of the ramps. So in actuality the palette has 249 unique colors intead of 256. Below are the duplicates:
- #000000: 0, 247
- #ffffff : 4, 168, 208, 224
- #4f0000 : 45, 190
- #430000 : 47, 191
- #000053 : 207, 240
RGB332 palette
This palette uses 3 bits for red, 3 bits for green, and 2 bits for blue.
The representation below is divided into 4 quadrants of increasing blue value and inside each quadrant red increases horizontally and green vertically.