Comment by cbolton

Comment by cbolton 4 hours ago

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There's a similar issue with retro video games and emulators: the screens on the original devices often had low color saturation, so the RGB data in those games were very saturated to compensate. Then people took the ROMs to use in emulators with modern screens, and the colors are over-saturated or just off. That's why you often see screenshots of retro games with ridiculously bright colors. Thankfully now many emulators implement filters to reproduce colors closer to the original look.

Some examples:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Gameboy/comments/bvqaec/why_and_how...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA-aQMUXKPM

forgotoldacc 3 hours ago

With the GBA, the original GBA screen and the first gen GBA SP had very washed out colors and not saturated at all. The Mario ports to the GBA looked doubly since they desaturated their colors and were shown on a desaturated screen. I've heard that the real reason the colors were desaturated was because the first GBA model didn't have a backlight so the colors were lightened to be more visible, but I'm not quite sure that's the case. Lots of other games didn't do that.

And with the second version of the GBA SP and the GB Micro, colors were very saturated. Particularly on the SP. If anything, cranking up the saturation on an emulator would get you closer to how things looked on those models, while heavily desaturating would get you closer to the look on earlier models.

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  • cubefox 22 minutes ago

    > With the GBA, the original GBA screen and the first gen GBA SP had very washed out colors and not saturated at all. The Mario ports to the GBA looked doubly since they desaturated their colors and were shown on a desaturated screen. I've heard that the real reason the colors were desaturated was because the first GBA model didn't have a backlight so the colors were lightened to be more visible,

    That's certainly the case. The super low screen brightness of the first GBA was a major problem, because you often literally couldn't see things properly under less than perfect ambient light. So compensating for low brightness was more important than compensating for low color saturation, which is merely an aesthetic issue.

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zeta0134 3 hours ago

Ah yes, we often get folks in the nesdev community bickering over which "NES Palette" (sourced from their favorite emulator) is the "best" one. The reality is extraordinarily complicated and I'm barely qualified to explain it:

https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/PPU_palettes#2C02

In addition to CRTs having variable properties, it turns out a lot of consoles (understandably!) cheat a little bit when generating a composite signal. The PPU's voltages are slightly out of spec, its timing is weird to work around a color artifact issue, and it generates a square wave for the chroma carrier rather than an ideal sine wave, which produces even more fun problems near the edges. So we've got all of that going on, and then the varying properties of how each TV chooses to interpret the signal. Then we throw electrons at phosphors and the pesky real world and human perception gets involved... it's a real mess!

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