Hello. This won’t be a big post, I’m just writing a small blurb as a reason to upload those two Pico-8 “palette analysis”.

I dug from the grave a while ago Grafx2, a graphic software oriented towards pixelart I used a long time ago when I was interested in making some pixelated stuff, because I remembered that Dawnbringer, the person behind the popular DB16 and DB32 palettes, also did some scripts in a package named “DBToolbox”. In one of those scripts is residing a small script generating many graphs and helpers to help someone design their palette with this result in mind.

I’m going to be honest, event though I understand the most of the generated pictures, I wouldn’t have any use of them as of now. So I run the function on Pico-8’s palette and here are the results:

I still have a few thoughts. I don’t think the “useful mixes” section is to be really interesting when using Pico-8. Pico-8’s screen size and the way it’s usually scaled would let me think it’s usually not practical for dithering. Dithering works usually when the pixels are small enough or the medium be imprecise enough to let them perceptually blend them and unless the person running the VM scales the game at 100%, it might not work really good.

For reference, I’m also putting Dawnbringer’s own 16-color palette, DB16, here.

Have a nice day.