Looking for the original 1990s arcade hardware color palette

[MiamiGTX]

Hi everyone

I’m trying to find the actual hardware color palette used by arcade systems in the early 90s (around 1990–1995).

To be clear: I’m not looking for the artistic palettes used by Capcom, SNK, or specific games (like CPS‑2 sprite palettes or Neo‑Geo character palettes). I’m looking for the hardware color space and limitations that these systems used.

For example: CPS‑1 and CPS‑2 used RGB 15‑bit (5 bits per channel), which means 32 levels per channel and 32,768 possible colors Neo‑Geo also used RGB 15‑bit Mega Drive used RGB 9‑bit (512 colors) SNES used RGB 15‑bit with 256 colors on screen

What I’m looking for is:

A downloadable palette file (PNG, GPL, ACT, etc.)

Or a complete 15‑bit RGB palette (all 32,768 colors)

Or a tool/script that converts modern RGB into accurate 15‑bit arcade colors Basically,

I want to recreate the authentic early‑90s arcade color look

If anyone has : a CPS‑1 / CPS‑2 hardware palette dump a Neo‑Geo hardware palette a 15‑bit RGB palette file or any resource that reproduces the real hardware color space …I would really appreciate it.

Thanks in advance !

[it290]

I don't think the arcade platforms you're talking about really have a defined palette per se, they're not like earlier machines with more limited palettes that have a limited and tweaked set of colors; they're basically just outputting RGB with a more limited color resolution than you'd find with modern 24-bit color output. In practice 32k colors is way too many for a palette file to be useful and the on-screen colors have way more to do with the potentiometers on the monitor than they do with the system's 'palette,' and the actual aesthetics of games have much more to do with what colors the artists actually selected to use together than they do with hardware limitations.

If you really want a palette file, probably your best bet is screen capping something like the color bars in 240p test suite, or maybe one of the screens from the actual coin-op/BIOS tests of the CPS2 or MVS. You can then use this in something like photoshop to convert an image into that palette, but I can tell you ahead of time it's not going to do anything more than converting it to 15-bit color (or even 12-bit) without the use of a specific palette. This will not get you a 'Neo Geo look' though, the look is a product of the actual art and the display technology (e.g. CRT) used to reproduce it.

Now, it's different with more limited systems like the Mega Drive; those do have a predefined and pretty specific palette, for which there are ample resources online.

[MiamiGTX]

Thanks for the quick reply !
I get what you mean, these systems don’t have a fixed palette like older consoles, and yeah, they basically just output 15‑bit RGB. That part is clear.

What I’m trying to understand a bit deeper is how the hardware actually behaved inside that 15‑bit space.
Even if the system can technically output all 32k colors, games still worked with small sub‑palettes, quantization steps, and the DAC behavior of each board. That’s the part I’m trying to reproduce accurately.

I’m not looking for an “artistic palette,” more the hardware color space + how it was used in practice.

If anyone has info on CPS1/CPS2/MVS DAC characteristics, test‑screen captures, or how these systems handled color rounding, I’d love to dig into that.

[it290]

So I think what you want to be looking at are things like sprite and tile limitations. For instance, with the Neo-Geo, sprite tiles are limited to 16 colors, and you can only have 256 of these 16-color palettes at any given time. In practice this sort of thing is pretty difficult to simulate with Photoshop, but you can approximate it by just making sure no sprite uses more than 16 colors (in reality it's a little more complex than this because most sprites are comprised of multiple sprite tiles that technically can have their own palette, but I don't think that was often utilized to have more colors in for a single PC/NPC). https://wiki.neogeodev.org//index.php/Main_Page is a great resource for this.

I wouldn't worry about the DAC. With the Neo in particular it had many hardware revisions between the AES and MVS units, and they're all gonna output video somewhat differently, you're not going to find anything super consistent in the hardware and how it affects the screen being displayed. CPS2 is more limited in terms of revisions but still what the colors look like on screen is gonna be more dependent on the monitor than anything else.