C64 RGB colours?

Does anyone know the equivalent RGB colour constants for the C64 colours? I can work out black and white ;-) but the others were great shades that gave the C64 that unique feel. All the spectrum ones were just pure colours and half bright ones.

thanks

Grey Alien,

Grab a copy of CCS64 - you should be able to get a palette from that.

Will something like this be "enough close":

http://unusedino.de/ec64/technical/misc/vic656x/colors/

:D

Can you take a screenshot in a C64 emulator and then sample the colours in your fav image editor?

@mustang, thats cool.

I thought about using an emulator but I'm lazy right now.

Mustang that ROCKS!

This is the meat of it:

00 00 00
FF FF FF
68 37 2B
70 A4 B2
6F 3D 86
58 8D 43
35 28 79
B8 C7 6F
6F 4F 25
43 39 00
9A 67 59
44 44 44
6C 6C 6C
9A D2 84
6C 5E B5
95 95 95

And to conclude ...



although I can't help think they are too dark, mind you these are the gamma corrected ones from mustang's doc. Could just be that I haven't seen a real C64 in years, only emus.

Lol, when I first got a C64 I only had a black and white portable.

Hmm, they don't look right to me... certainly not how I remember them anyway.

The closest I've seen to the real thing is the 'ccs64' external palette of the Vice emulator.

Is that all the colours the C64 had? They certainly are a strange set of colours to choose - there's no red!

lol, Indie, yeah I remember tellys like that, my friend had a Vic20 on a B&W, it was such as disappointment. I persuaded my dad to get a colour set from radio rentals when I bought my Spectrum (first computer), let's see ... 1983. You remember having to tune with that fiddly little removable stick or dials under a flap?

Big10p: Haven't you ever seen a C64? How old are you? The red is at the top, it was always a sorta off red.

VIP3R, they are pretty close, the screen shot is a jog and it has slighty blended them a bit. the blue at the bottom is good. Maybe I'll check that page again ... unless someone else wants to chip in...

In the doc it says "The whole issue of VIC-II color-emulation is so mis-guiding and irritating, because every c64-emulator uses different palettes and these have been created by using cheap frame-grabbers/digitizers with strange color-behaviour or by moving around some rgb-sliders until it looks quite right. Many people have forgotten how the colors on a real C64 look, because they use emulators for a long time. Some people like DeeKay/Crest or Cyclone/Haujobb (he's also a member of Crest nowadays if I remember correctly) were able to create pretty good palettes by moving around rgb-sliders and comparing to a real C64, but the system described on this page gets even closer than this. Most probably you won't come much closer to the real thing, than this at all."

hah, this comment by one of the C64 creator's has left me shocked!

"I'm afraid that not nearly as much effort went into the color selection as you think. Since we had total control over hue, saturation and luminance, we picked colors that we liked. In order to save space on the chip, though, many of the colors were simply the opposite side of the color wheel from ones that we picked. This allowed us to reuse the existing resistor values, rather than having a completely unique set for each color."

OK, to try better colours, someone please convert the numbers in brackets to Hex so there are 16*3 (48) of them and repost as $rrggbb and I'll post a new screenie (well forget the first two (black and white).

# name r g b 
 0        black    0,0                 (  0)    0,0                 (  0)    0,0                 (  0) 
 1        white  255,0                 (255)  255,0                 (255)  255,0                 (255) 
 2        red  115,5056370133016413  (116)   66,58650018832567614 ( 67)   53,28138539871917648 ( 53) 
 3        cyan  123,5568629866983587  (124)  172,4759998116743239  (172)  185,7811146012808235  (186) 
 4         purple   123,0390152263466744  (123)    72,13070800338535009 ( 72)   144,417137626541581   (144)  
 5        green  100,0859847736533256  (100)  150,9942919966146499  (151)   78,70786237345841898 ( 79) 
 6        blue   63,75                ( 64)   50,2827791540772     ( 50)  132,7525027686297     (133) 
 7        yellow  191,25                (191)  204,7172208459228     (205)  122,2474972313703     (122) 
 8        orange  123,0390152263466744  (123)   91,17623437116303968 ( 91)   46,83286237345841898 ( 47) 
 9        brown   78,5863581298472838  ( 79)   68,63075279282998076 ( 69)    0,00000000000962268 (  0) 
 A  light red  163,3181370133016413  (163)  114,3990001883256761  (114)  101,0938853987191765  (101) 
 B   dark grey   79,6875              ( 80)   79,6875              ( 80)   79,6875              ( 80) 
 C        grey  119,53125             (120)  119,53125             (120)  119,53125             (120) 
 D  light green  163,8359847736533256  (164)  214,7442919966146499  (215)  142,457862373458419   (142) 
 E  light blue  119,53125             (120)  106,0640291540772     (106)  188,5337527686297     (189) 
 F  light grey  159,375               (159)  159,375               (159)  159,375               (159) 

Those colour numbers are -way- out, the red is dark brown when converted to RGB.

Here are the RGB values of the ccs64 palette I mentioned, try them and see what you think...

Black: 0 0 0
White: 255 255 255
Red: 224 64 64
Cyan: 96 255 255
Magenta: 224 96 224
Green: 64 224 64
Blue: 64 64 224
Yellow: 255 255 64
Orange: 224 160 64
Brown: 156 116 72
Pink: 255 160 160
DGrey: 84 84 84
Grey: 136 136 136
LGreen: 160 255 160
LBlue: 160 160 255
LGrey: 192 192 192

Grey Alien's post is spot on - if you have an accurate colour profile loaded in Windows (which you should have) and your gamma settings are optimal. In other words, if your display is configured properly, the colours are correct.

I copied the CCS64 values (and probably tweaked them a bit) for my View64 BlitzMax proggie.
They seem to match pretty close to the original.

Click images for full version:


[img http://homepage.ntlworld.com/config/view64/view2s.png]

Have a play with View64 and see what you think.

(View64 loads standard images from a folder then displays them in RETRO-VISION tm)

It never occured to me that the emulators might have inacurrate colours but now I've looked at a few screenshots, the red is too red and cyan too cyan etc, they look more like spectrum games (spec used pure colours). The c64 had unique tones that weren't so "pure". I think our perspective has been distorted by emulators. If you read mustang's doc it does make perfect sense.

OK, seeing as noone else could be bothered ;-) I converted the non-gamma corrected colours from mustang's doc and produced this ... (also used lower jpg compression)



to be honest this looks a bit better on my screen (perhaps suggesting my gamma isn't perfect). This also looks a lot better than the emulator colours imho. Here's the hex:

C64Colours(0) = $000000
C64Colours(1) = $FFFFFF
C64Colours(2) = $744335
C64Colours(3) = $7CACBA
C64Colours(4) = $7B4890
C64Colours(5) = $64974F
C64Colours(6) = $403285
C64Colours(7) = $BFCD7A
C64Colours(8) = $7B5B2F
C64Colours(9) = $4f4500
C64Colours(10) = $a37265
C64Colours(11) = $505050
C64Colours(12) = $787878
C64Colours(13) = $a4d78e
C64Colours(14) = $786abd
C64Colours(15) = $9f9f9f

That's more the way I remember it, with that orange being not bright (more brown), the red being dark, the cyan was never cyan (like the spectrum) it was always a pastelly blue. Also the purple was "purple" not magenta (that's a spectrum colour again). The yellow was never bright yellow like 255,255,0 it was different.

Surprise - Somebody already did it all for us...

http://members.aol.com/howtogodot/epalet.htm


Andy

Hmm, that page is interesting but it was done by eye. Note how the red is still very dark, which is correct as I remember. I also suspect that the appearance of colours on monitors may be different from those on TVs. Of course the monitor colours should be accepted as purer but many of us just used TVs.

I'll input them and see how we get on ...



Hmm, well some seem pretty good but others, like the light blues, I'm not sure about, but until I actually see a real C64 in action again (if ever) I can't properly say!

The main problem is that most of us used our C64's via a portable TV. All of which have adjustable colour, brightness and contrast. So the C64 colours you 'remember' depend heavily on the settings of your TV at the time.

Maybe that's why there's so much disagreement on which are correct?

How can you remember those colours? I can't even remember what colour underwear I put on this morning. And that's my point, you don't need to remember if you feel comfortable with them :D

Well, all you can remember is 16 shades of grey :P

There's only less than a handful of differences between c64 colors and msx1 colors, Iirc the TMS 9918 (the videochip of the msx1, and iirc also the speccy) had these colors:



If I sort the c64 colors so that they somewhat match the TMS 9918 index, you'll get this:



Not *much* of a difference if you take a few brightnesses for granted.

CS_TBL: Interesting that they are quite similar.

I (think) I remember the C64 colours quite well as I programmed it a lot and even made pseudo colours by swapping between two really quickly in assembly. As I said earlier, I had a Spec and a C64 and the Spec colours were all pure and a lot of emulator screenshots seem to look more like spectrum screenshots that C64 ones, esp. with regards to Red which was really quite dark.