Alternate Palettes in C64 core?

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Don't Panic. Please wash hands.

    I've realized that me and many others with NTSC C64s back in the day increased the saturation control on their CRT monitor to make the colors brighter. Obviously nobody was using any kind of proper monitor color calibration, so we just adjusted the controls until it looked good, and it generally looked better with the color cranked up since the C64's actual palette is a bit dull. I didn't even realize that the C64's palette was dull until I started using C64 emulators years later.


    VICE now has a saturation control, and when I turn that up, it looks much more like the palette I remember seeing in the 80s. However, hardly any monitor that has RGB input has a saturation control, so there's no way for me to adjust this when using the TC64.


    It was said in the other thread about adjusting the gamma that custom palettes are partly a core space issue, but could it just be adjusted by hex-editing the palette definition numbers within the C64 core image? Or would it be possible to add a color saturation control like VICE has?


    I also would be somewhat happy if you simply had the option to use the PAL palette in NTSC mode, because the PAL palette looks closer to what I remember than the NTSC palette, even though I had an NTSC machine.

    Quote from PaulSlocum

    could it just be adjusted by hex-editing the palette definition numbers within the C64 core image?

    The FPGA image has a checksum and the FPGA will not accept it if the file is edited. This is of course a safety feature, as an improper FPGA image can cause bus contention, possibly even a defect.


    Quote from PaulSlocum

    Or would it be possible to add a color saturation control like VICE has?

    This is where FPGA space is too tight. We'd have to drop other features to do that, or dive deep into optimizing things, such as making a multi-threaded SID or a multi-threaded CPU, so the drive CPUs would take up less space. That's work for "when we left beta".


    Quote from PaulSlocum

    I also would be somewhat happy if you simply had the option to use the PAL palette in NTSC mode, because the PAL palette looks closer to what I remember than the NTSC palette, even though I had an NTSC machine.

    This may be an option. I'll talk to Peter about this.


    Jens