Commander X16

I have updated the first post with a slightly improved version of the palette. Some of the gradients didn't translate well with simple rounded math, and bitshifting is even worse. So I've now improved the gradient colors by matching the closest perceived color by doing CIEDE2000 against the full 4096 color space. It is quite slow to do, but the result is a lot better ?

I've also continued work on my CodeSandbox project, the Indexed Palette Converter. I originally wrote it to convert between a couple of palette file formats to work with images between a couple of programs, but it has now extended a bit. During the past week I rewrote the UI to Preact + htm and added support for:

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  Displaying palette in multiple color depths
  


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  Saving palette in the displayed color depth
  


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  Read and write ACT palettes
  


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  Read and write GIMP palettes
  


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  Read and write VICE palettes
  


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  Read and write 16-bit palettes in both 512 and 768 byte raw binary files (although I haven't encountered these)
  


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  Read GIF global palette
  

I've also fixed things like bit terminology.

Next I'm planning to add some palette editing and generation capabilities. Also I probably should do some internal refactor as currently the palette values are manually stored in Windows RIFF compatible format all the time and I probably should just do some palette class to reduce code repetition ? 



However this is pretty far off from Commander X16 so I guess I keep this as a one time update.

During my adventures on the internet I found a place where people submit their palettes and noticed Dawnbringer's Aurora, which is a 256 color palette. It got my attention because handcrafted 256 unique color palettes appear to be a bit rare, it has the full 12-bit 16 color grayscale included just like CX16, and the colors are almost fully unique even after auto-reduction to 12-bit. While the palette could be ported to CX16 almost as-is I did see a little bit more trouble and adjusted some of the colors manually a bit after auto-conversion, and moved C64 colors to the top. To do that I had to abandon the pure greys so I stole ideas from C64 palette I use in VICE. It sacrifices the two darker greys with ones that are biased to green. The light grey instead is moved towards orange so you end up with a skin tone. However I didn't attempt to have perfect luma so the color balance is slightly off if you throw them into a VICE palette and watch demos or images. Black and white use the darkest and lightest blues in the palette.



Maybe someone finds this useful in a project ?

Thank you for this palette. I had to use similar palette on past retro-project so this may be useful for my future x16 projects.