This article is a list of the
color palettes for notable
computer graphics
Computer graphics deals with generating images with the aid of computers. Today, computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great de ...
,
terminals and
video game console
A video game console is an electronic device that Input/output, outputs a video signal or image to display a video game that can be played with a game controller. These may be home video game console, home consoles, which are generally placed i ...
hardware.
Only a sample and the palette's name are given here. More specific articles are linked from the name of each palette, for the test charts, samples, simulated images, and further technical details (including references).
In the past, manufacturers have developed many different display systems in a competitive, non-collaborative basis (with a few exceptions, as the
VESA
VESA (), formally known as Video Electronics Standards Association, is an American technical standards organization for computer display standards. The organization was incorporated in California in July 1989To retrieve the information, searc ...
consortium), creating many proprietary, non-standard different instances of display
hardware. Often, as with early
personal
Personal may refer to:
Aspects of persons' respective individualities
* Privacy
* Personality
* Personal, personal advertisement, variety of classified advertisement used to find romance or friendship
Companies
* Personal, Inc., a Washington, ...
and
home computers, a given machine employed its unique display subsystem, with its also unique color palette. Also,
software
Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.
At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...
developers had made use of the color abilities of distinct display systems in many different ways. The result is that there is no single common standard nomenclature or classification taxonomy which can encompass every computer color palette.
In order to organize the material, color palettes have been grouped following arbitrary but rational criteria. First, generic monochrome and full
RGB
The RGB color model is an additive color model in which the red, green and blue primary colors of light are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colors. The name of the model comes from the initials of the three addi ...
repertories common to various computer display systems. Second, usual color repertories used for display systems that employ
indexed color
In computing, indexed color is a technique to manage digital images' colors in a limited fashion, in order to save computer memory and file storage, while speeding up display refresh and file transfers. It is a form of vector quantization comp ...
techniques. And finally, specific manufacturers' color palettes implemented in many representative early
personal computer
A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or tec ...
s and
videogame console
A video game console is an electronic device that outputs a video signal or image to display a video game that can be played with a game controller. These may be home consoles, which are generally placed in a permanent location connected to a t ...
s of various brands.
The list for personal computer palettes is split into two categories:
8-bit
In computer architecture, 8-bit Integer (computer science), integers or other Data (computing), data units are those that are 8 bits wide (1 octet (computing), octet). Also, 8-bit central processing unit (CPU) and arithmetic logic unit (ALU) arc ...
and
16-bit
16-bit microcomputers are microcomputers that use 16-bit microprocessors.
A 16-bit register can store 216 different values. The range of integer values that can be stored in 16 bits depends on the integer representation used. With the two mos ...
machines. This is not intended as a true strict categorization of such machines, because mixed architectures also exist (16-bit
processor
Processor may refer to:
Computing Hardware
* Processor (computing)
**Central processing unit (CPU), the hardware within a computer that executes a program
*** Microprocessor, a central processing unit contained on a single integrated circuit (I ...
s with an 8-bit
data bus
In computer architecture, a bus (shortened form of the Latin '' omnibus'', and historically also called data highway or databus) is a communication system that transfers data between components inside a computer, or between computers. This e ...
or 32-bit processors with a 16-bit data bus, among others). The distinction is based more on broad 8-bit and 16-bit computer ''ages'' or ''generations'' (around 1975–1985 and 1985–1995, respectively) and their associated
state of the art
The state of the art (sometimes cutting edge or leading edge) refers to the highest level of general development, as of a device, technique, or scientific field achieved at a particular time. However, in some contexts it can also refer to a level ...
in color display capabilities.
Here is the common color test chart and sample image used to render every palette in this series of articles:
:
See further details in the summary paragraph of the corresponding article.
List of monochrome and RGB palettes
For the purpose of this article, the term ''monochrome palette'' means a set of intensities for a monochrome display, and the term ''RGB palette'' is defined as the complete set of combinations a given
RGB
The RGB color model is an additive color model in which the red, green and blue primary colors of light are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colors. The name of the model comes from the initials of the three addi ...
display can offer by mixing all the possible intensities of the red, green, and blue primaries available in its hardware.
These are generic complete repertories of colors to produce black and white and RGB color pictures by the display hardware, not necessarily the total number of such colors that can be simultaneously displayed in a given text or graphic mode of any machine. RGB is the most common method to produce colors for displays; so these complete RGB color repertories have every possible combination of R-G-B triplets within any given maximum number of levels per component.
For specific hardware and different methods to produce colors than RGB, see the
List of computer hardware palettes and the
List of video game consoles
The list of video game consoles is split into the following articles:
* List of dedicated video game consoles
* List of handheld game consoles
* List of home video game consoles
** List of first generation home video game consoles
* List of mi ...
sections.
For various software arrangements and sorts of colors, including other possible full RGB arrangements within 8-bit
depth displays, see the
List of software palettes This is a list of software palettes used by computers. Systems that use a 4-bit or 8-bit pixel depth can display up to 16 or 256 colors simultaneously. Many personal computers in the early 1990s displayed at most 256 different colors, freely s ...
section.
Monochrome palettes
These palettes
only have some shades of gray.
:
Dichrome palettes
Each permuted pair of red, green, and blue (16-bit color palette, with 65,536 colors). For example, "additive red green" has zero blue and "subtractive red green" has full blue.
:
Regular RGB palettes
These full RGB palettes employ the same number of
bit
The bit is the most basic unit of information in computing and digital communications. The name is a portmanteau of binary digit. The bit represents a logical state with one of two possible values. These values are most commonly represente ...
s to store the relative intensity for the red, green and blue components of every image's
pixel
In digital imaging, a pixel (abbreviated px), pel, or picture element is the smallest addressable element in a raster image, or the smallest point in an all points addressable display device.
In most digital display devices, pixels are the smal ...
color. Thus, they have the same number of levels per channel and the total number of possible colors is always the cube of a power of two. It should be understood ''that 'when developed' ''many of these formats were directly related to the size of some host computers 'natural word length' in bytes—the amount of memory in bits held by a single memory address such that the CPU can grab or put it in one operation.
:
Non-regular RGB palettes
These are also RGB palettes, in the sense defined above (except for the 4-bit RGBI, which has an intensity bit that affects all channels at once), but either they do not have the same number of levels for each primary channel, or the numbers are not powers of two, so are not represented as separate bit fields. All of these have been used in popular
personal computer
A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or tec ...
s.
:
List of software palettes
Systems that use a 4-bit or 8-bit pixel
depth can display up to 16 or 256 colors simultaneously. Many
personal computer
A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or tec ...
s in the later 1980s and early 1990s displayed at most 256 different colors, freely selected by
software
Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.
At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...
(either by the user or by a program) from their wider hardware's color palette.
Usual selections of colors in limited subsets (generally 16 or 256) of the full palette includes some RGB level arrangements commonly used with the 8 bpp palettes as ''master palettes'' or ''universal palettes'' (i.e., palettes for multipurpose uses).
These are some representative software palettes, but any selection can be made in such types of systems.
System specific palettes
These are selections of colors officially employed as system palettes in some popular
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...
s for
personal computer
A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or tec ...
s that feature 8-bit displays.
:
RGB arrangements
These are selections of colors based on evenly ordered RGB levels, mainly used as ''master palettes'' to display any kind of image within the limitations of the 8-bit pixel depth.
:
Other common uses of software palettes
:
List of computer hardware palettes
In early
personal computer
A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or tec ...
s and
terminals that offered color displays, some color palettes were chosen algorithmically to provide the most diverse set of colors for a given palette size, and others were chosen to assure the availability of certain colors. In many early home computers, especially when the palette choices were determined at the hardware level by
resistor
A resistor is a passive two-terminal electrical component that implements electrical resistance as a circuit element. In electronic circuits, resistors are used to reduce current flow, adjust signal levels, to divide voltages, bias active el ...
combinations, the palette was determined by the manufacturer.
Many early models output
composite video
Composite video is an analog video signal format that carries standard-definition video (typically at 525 lines or 625 lines) as a single channel. Video information is encoded on one channel, unlike the higher-quality S-Video (two channels) a ...
colors. When seen on TV devices, the perception of the colors may not correspond with the value levels for the color values employed (most noticeable with NTSC TV color system).
For current RGB display systems for
PC's (
Super VGA
Super VGA (SVGA) is a broad term that covers a wide range of computer display standards that extended IBM's Video Graphics Array, VGA specification.
When used as shorthand for a resolution, as VGA and XGA often are, SVGA refers to a resolution of ...
, etc.), see the
16-bit RGB and
24-bit RGB for
HighColor
High color graphics is a method of storing image information in a computer's memory such that each pixel is represented by two bytes. Usually the color is represented by all 16 bits, but some devices also support 15-bit high color.
More recentl ...
(''thousands'') and
TrueColor (''millions of colors'') modes.
For
video game console
A video game console is an electronic device that Input/output, outputs a video signal or image to display a video game that can be played with a game controller. These may be home video game console, home consoles, which are generally placed i ...
s, see the
List of video game consoles
The list of video game consoles is split into the following articles:
* List of dedicated video game consoles
* List of handheld game consoles
* List of home video game consoles
** List of first generation home video game consoles
* List of mi ...
section.
For every model, their main different graphical color modes are listed based exclusively in the way they handle colors on screen, not all their different screen modes.
The list is ordered roughly historically by video hardware, not grouped by branch. They are listed according to the original model of every system, which implies that enhanced versions, clones and compatibles also support the original palette.
Terminals and 8-bit machines
:
16-bit machines
:
Video game console palettes
Color palettes of some of the most popular
video game console
A video game console is an electronic device that Input/output, outputs a video signal or image to display a video game that can be played with a game controller. These may be home video game console, home consoles, which are generally placed i ...
s. The criteria are the same as those of the
List of computer hardware palettes section.
See also
*
List of monochrome and RGB color formats
This list of monochrome and RGB palettes includes generic repertoires of colors ( color palettes) to produce black-and-white and RGB color pictures by a computer's display hardware. RGB is the most common method to produce colors for displays; ...
*
List of software palettes This is a list of software palettes used by computers. Systems that use a 4-bit or 8-bit pixel depth can display up to 16 or 256 colors simultaneously. Many personal computers in the early 1990s displayed at most 256 different colors, freely s ...
*
List of 8-bit computer hardware palettes
This is a list of notable 8-bit computer color palettes, and graphics, which were primarily manufactured from 1975 to 1985. Although some of them use RGB palettes, more commonly they have 4, 16 or more color palettes that are not bit nor level c ...
*
List of 16-bit computer hardware palettes
This is a list of notable RGB hardware color palettes used on 16-bit computers, which were primarily manufactured from 1985 to 1995. Due to mixed-bit architectures, the ''n''-bit distinction is not always a strict categorization.
:
Atari
ST ...
*
List of video game console palettes
This is a full list of color palettes for notable video game console hardware.
For each unique palette, an image color test chart and sample image (original True color version follows) rendered with that palette (without dithering unless oth ...
*
Palette (computing)
In computer graphics, a palette is the set of available colors from which an image can be made. In some systems, the palette is fixed by the hardware design, and in others it is dynamic, typically implemented via a color lookup table (CLUT), ...
*
Indexed color
In computing, indexed color is a technique to manage digital images' colors in a limited fashion, in order to save computer memory and file storage, while speeding up display refresh and file transfers. It is a form of vector quantization comp ...
*
List of colors (compact)
The following list shows a compact version of the colors in the list of colors A–F, G–M, and N–Z articles. The list shows the color swatch and its name. Hovering over the color box shows the HSV, RGB, and #hex values for the color in ...
*
Web colors
Web colors are colors used in displaying web pages on the World Wide Web, and the methods for describing and specifying those colors. Colors may be specified as an RGB triplet or in hexadecimal format (a ''hex triplet'') or according to their ...
*
X11 color names
In computing, on the X Window System, X11 color names are represented in a simple text file, which maps certain strings to RGB color values. It was traditionally shipped with every X11 installation, hence the name, and is usually located in ''< ...
*
Color depth
Color depth or colour depth (see spelling differences), also known as bit depth, is either the number of bits used to indicate the color of a single pixel, or the number of bits used for each color component of a single pixel. When referring to ...
*
Computer display
A computer monitor is an output device that displays information in pictorial or textual form. A discrete monitor comprises a visual display, support electronics, power supply, housing, electrical connectors, and external user controls.
The d ...
*
List of home computers by video hardware
This is a list of home computers, sorted alphanumerically, which lists all relevant details of their video hardware.
Home computers are the second generation of desktop computers, entering the market in 1977 and becoming common during the 1980s. ...
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Color palettes
Palettes
Color depths
Computer graphics
Computing output devices
color palettes