NES Palettes

8-bit consoles didn't had all the luxury that modern consoles have. It was a more limited era, where every bite mattered. Released in the early-mid 80's, the NES was a very famous and important console. However, one detail that many people might completely miss (unless you're an artist or a sprite ripper), is that the colours you see—for example, in an emulator, or on the virtual console—are not the same colors a kid playing on a CRT saw, which, in turn, were also different from another kid playing on a CRT! Crazy, right?

To summarize, the NES didn't output straight RGB colours, the image generated was an encoded NTSC video signal that TV had to decode, which ultimately made variation from one TV to another. To make a very terrible analogy here, it's like transmitting a message between a group of people and each one writing it down in their own handwriting, which is very different from one person to another, resulting in the same message being written in different letters.

Because of this, there's not really a "definitive", or "true" NES palette. It all comes down to preference, whether you just like a more vibrant-looking game or something that is more resembling of a CRT. So if you see someone pulling out a "The NES palette is defined by the following colours:", keep in mind they are simply wrong, and they don't know what they are talking about.

There is no definitive palette, however, there's one great nitpick of mine that is related to how the games may or may not have looked like in the TVs they were using at Nintendo.
Here's a Miyamoto quote on how Super Mario Bros.'s sky looked like on his television.

This is something that fascinated me recently, and it's for a simple reason: I like its ambiguity, as it opens many creative ways of displaying NES games, either by changing some tones or giving it a whole new shade! The fact that there's so few colors (relatively) also helps in a way that makes it easier to see all of them.

The following is a dump of pages where you can learn more and some resources, after that, I'll be showing some palettes and game screenshots: