Pixel Art Color Palettes: NES, SNES, Game Boy & Retro Console Guide

Every retro gaming console had a specific color palette dictated by its hardware. Modern pixel art that references these eras looks most authentic when it respects those original constraints. This guide maps each console's color capabilities to practical palette settings.

NES (1983): 54 colors, 4 per sprite

The Nintendo Entertainment System's PPU (Picture Processing Unit) generated 54 distinct colors from a fixed palette. Each sprite could use only 4 colors (3 colors + transparency). Background tiles used 4 color sets of 3 colors plus a shared backdrop color.

Pixel Art Workshop equivalent: Set palette colors to 8, then apply the 8-bit preset. K-means quantization at 256 colors produces output that's within the NES's total available palette, though individual sprites should use fewer. For authentic NES sprite work, manually reduce to 4 colors.

Game Boy DMG (1989): 4 shades of olive-green

The original Game Boy's dot-matrix screen displayed exactly 4 shades of a greenish-olive color. Every game — from Tetris to Pokémon — used the same four tones:

• Darkest (olive-black)
• Dark olive
• Light olive
• Lightest (olive-white)

Pixel Art Workshop equivalent: Enable grayscale, then set palette colors to 4. The K-means algorithm will find the optimal 4 luma levels. For authentic Game Boy coloring, apply a green tint in post-processing.

SNES / Super Famicom (1990): 32,768 colors, 256 on screen

The SNES used a 15-bit color space (5 bits per channel = 32 levels each = 32,768 total). However, the PPU could only display 256 colors simultaneously from that pool, organized into 8 palettes of 16 colors each (plus 8 sprite palettes).

Pixel Art Workshop equivalent: Use the 16-bit preset, which applies R5G6B5 channel quantization — 5 bits red, 6 bits green, 5 bits blue. This is the actual VRAM format used by the SNES and Sega Genesis hardware. The extra green bit reflects the human eye's greater sensitivity to green luminance.

Sega Genesis / Mega Drive (1988): 512 colors, 64 on screen

The Genesis VDP supported 512 colors (3 bits per channel = 8 levels each) with 64 simultaneous colors across 4 palettes of 16. More constrained than SNES in total colors, but with larger sprite capabilities.

Pixel Art Workshop equivalent: Set palette to 8-16 colors for authentic Genesis-era output. The reduced color count produces the characteristic color banding visible in Sonic the Hedgehog and Streets of Rage.

EGA (1984): 16 colors, fixed palette

IBM's Enhanced Graphics Adapter offered exactly 16 colors — the same palette used by early DOS games, Windows 3.0, and early web design. Black, blue, green, cyan, red, magenta, brown, light gray, dark gray, light blue, light green, light cyan, light red, light magenta, yellow, white.

Pixel Art Workshop equivalent: Drag the palette slider to exactly 16. K-means will find the best 16-color reduction, approximating the EGA palette's limited range.

Modern pixel art: no constraints

Contemporary pixel art tools like Aseprite and Pixel Art Workshop support 32-bit color (16.7 million colors) with no palette reduction. The 32-bit preset keeps full photographic color depth — only the pixel size re-grids the image. Use this when the retro aesthetic comes from chunky pixels rather than limited colors.