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VICE palette files with colors as seen on real machines

Posted: Tue Sep 08, 2015 12:15 pm
by pixel
I picked the colors from http://wayofthepixel.net/index.php?topic=13904.0 and made VPL files of them.

PAL: http://hugbox.org/pixel/external/denial ... ic-pal.vpl
NTSC: http://hugbox.org/pixel/external/denial ... c-ntsc.vpl

They look quite nice without CRT emulation, saving you CPU time. But when I turn on CRT emulation – now THAT's the kind of color suckage that makes my heart jump in delight. :mrgreen:

What do you think?

Re: VICE palette files with colors as seen on real machines

Posted: Tue Sep 08, 2015 12:25 pm
by Boray
but... I own 4 Vic-20s and all of them differ in colors. The biggest difference is between CR and non-CR. At least with mine.

Re: VICE palette files with colors as seen on real machines

Posted: Tue Sep 08, 2015 1:02 pm
by beamrider
and also depends how you set the controls on the TV/monitor

Re: VICE palette files with colors as seen on real machines

Posted: Tue Sep 08, 2015 3:12 pm
by tokra
And now we've come full circle :D The files originated here. If I remember correctly they are based on my VIC that Mike S-Video-modded for me and my or daraktx's NTSC-VIC.

Re: VICE palette files with colors as seen on real machines

Posted: Tue Sep 08, 2015 3:30 pm
by groepaz
i'm not a big fan of hand-tuned RGB palettes for emulators - for the reasons already mentioned. another important reason is that the CBM machines do not produce RGB colors at all, they output either YUV (PAL) or YIQ (NTSC) and the color decoding process in the monitor plays an important role on what colors you actually see (and if you dont have a calibrated high quality video monitor, such as a sony-pvm, comparing emulator output to it is a bit pointless). all of that makes it pretty much impossible to create "the correct palette". thats why the while CRT emulation stuff in VICE was introduced, it actually allows to generate proper colors on the fly - the only problem is that noone came up with exact measurements for the VIC-1 color angles yet.

that said, imho the estimated defaults in current VICE are not *that* far off anyway:
vic1.png
vic1.png (279.35 KiB) Viewed 2769 times
(PAL defaults with CRT emulation)
vic2.png
vic2.png (80.67 KiB) Viewed 2769 times
(the above palette without CRT emulation)

(the underlayed screenshot comes from mike's colour-tester post, i am just hoping it came from a real VIC)

Re: VICE palette files with colors as seen on real machines

Posted: Tue Sep 08, 2015 4:27 pm
by tokra
(the underlayed screenshot comes from mike's colour-tester post, i am just hoping it came from a real VIC)
I am pretty sure those screenshots came from Mike's favorite VICE-version back then (1.22)? Mike himself could probably confirm.
However about a year ago I recorded video from both my PAL- and NTSC-VIC-20 (both S-Video-modded) and recorded this with my DVD-recorder (Pioneer DVR-433). This is probably better than a photograph off a monitor and also the same device used for both videos:

http://www.tokra.de/vic/colourtest/

Maybe this helps in creating a "better" palette? (not that I'm unhappy with the current one)

Re: VICE palette files with colors as seen on real machines

Posted: Wed Sep 09, 2015 1:09 am
by beamrider
Sorry to be pedantic, but isn't a DVD recorder just an analogue video decoder + frame grabber, so unless it is a calibrated/broadcast-quality model ,it's likely to suffer the same variances as other methods?

Re: VICE palette files with colors as seen on real machines

Posted: Wed Sep 09, 2015 1:27 am
by pixel
I was very unhappy with the non-CRT colors. In VICE as well as in my own stuff which, of course, has no CRT emulation. These palettes did the trick for me. That's the point I wanted to stress really. :)

Maybe they are a good alternative for VICE users who can't use CRT emulation, maybe on mobile or slow devices? Wouldn't want the current VICE palettes to go away. I'm aware that they're technically quite accurate and I like that, too.

Re: VICE palette files with colors as seen on real machines

Posted: Wed Sep 09, 2015 3:17 am
by groepaz
Sorry to be pedantic, but isn't a DVD recorder just an analogue video decoder + frame grabber, so unless it is a calibrated/broadcast-quality model ,it's likely to suffer the same variances as other methods?
unfortunately, yes. its still somewhat better than making photos from a monitor though (since it takes the camera sensor out of the equatation, which often have terrible colour accuracy unless its a very expensive device)
I was very unhappy with the non-CRT colors.
did you try the VICE build i linked above? if you just disable CRT emulation and keep the default "internal" palette, the colors shouldnt be all that different (and you can still adjust them to your preference using the "CRT" controls)

Re: VICE palette files with colors as seen on real machines

Posted: Wed Sep 09, 2015 4:18 am
by pixel
groepaz wrote:did you try the VICE build i linked above? if you just disable CRT emulation and keep the default "internal" palette, the colors shouldnt be all that different (and you can still adjust them to your preference using the "CRT" controls)
Oh, well, that did the trick on VICE with no CRT as well. One can't see if the color palette is set to "internal" or "default", btw. Mine was set to "default". m(

Re: VICE palette files with colors as seen on real machines

Posted: Thu Sep 10, 2015 9:37 pm
by microwerx
Unfortunately, you probably won't see the same colors on your LCD monitor because the gamut is not sufficient in most cases to cover the range of a CRT and the NTSC or PAL YUV color ranges. I know because I have done the math and they have been out of range for the RGB values. So much of it really comes down to your personal taste - which is a great thing because everyone remembers it differently. I really enjoy the colorful look of the VIC-20 because it is based on the YUV color wheel. I'll have to put up my colors sometime.


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Re: VICE palette files with colors as seen on real machines

Posted: Thu Sep 10, 2015 9:40 pm
by microwerx
I should add that when I plug my VIC-20 into my HDTV, it looks great, but I remember the colors being more vivid when I had an old 13" CRT a long time ago.


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Re: VICE palette files with colors as seen on real machines

Posted: Fri Sep 11, 2015 3:00 am
by beamrider
plasma or LCD ?

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Re: VICE palette files with colors as seen on real machines

Posted: Sat Sep 12, 2015 10:11 pm
by microwerx
LED HDTV. I bet it would look amazing on an OLED.


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Re: VICE palette files with colors as seen on real machines

Posted: Thu Nov 19, 2015 10:55 am
by groepaz
pushing this up once again...

i have recently added proper color generation and decoding for NTSC/YIQ to VICE, and as a result now at least for C64 the NTSC colors are pretty much correct. I also added Mikes VIC20 palettes (i hope you dont mind :)) .... however i am not entirely convinced by the VIC20 colors produced by the CRT emulation in NTSC with internal color generation - could someone from NTSC land please check out a recent snapshot and comment on it? somehow i am suspecting that, other than with the VIC-II, there is actually a different color generation circuit in the NTSC and PAL VICs (which would explain the difference).