A Palette Selector

Saturday, 24th April 2021

A recent thread on our Twitter account about CGA palettes resulted in a new graphic to show all the different 4-colour palettes available in the 320x200 graphics mode. It's an improvement on the simpler design I been using for the past six years, and shows what kind of dithering effects and background combinations each palette gives. I'll be using it to choose the best palette for each of my future games.

It's presented here for you to save for your own use if you like. I might develop it further in future. It would be particularly useful to have the appropriate CGALIB scr_palette() call next to each one instead of the arbitrary reference it has now. It also shows only a sample of dithering effects rather than a comprehensive collection for each palette, so maybe this could be addressed too.

Later edit: the link under "Related Downloads" contains a full resolution version of the palette chart for you to download.

CGA Palette Chart

Download: cga-palette.png
Size 28kb, downloads 362.

This image contains all of the 4-colour CGA palettes available in 320x200 mode. The letters and numbers beside each one provide an easy way to refer to a particular palette. The ones at the top (without letters) are in somewhat common use; the others are particular to this chart. (read more...)