Sega System 16 and color in games.

[mangis]

Does anyone know why Sega System 16 arcade games have such strange color, or rather, value choices? Almost every one of them looks washed out and bland. Games with saturated colors look better, but anything with more muted tones just looks washed out and gray.

http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=700

The games seem to use color values from 50% to 100%, but anything below that is a rare occurrence. Then there seems to be one pure black used in the palettes, making the washed out tones stand out even more.

The system specs don't really explain it (http://cgfm2.emuviews.com/txt/s16tech.txt):
- 4096 colors
- Backgrounds use 8x8 tiles, with 7 colors per tile from 128 different palettes.
- Sprites can have 14 colors, from 64 different palettes.

My guesses so far are:

- Sega's artists thought it looked good.

- The artists didn't have a proper workstation to intuitively create tiled graphics with palettes changing often, due to the unfortunate 7 color limit per tile. The games seem to avoid changing palettes as much as possible, to the point where one layer seems to only use one palette.

- The arcade displays had some screwed up gamma settings.

 

[deathshadow]

I figure it probably had something to do with the displays being used being CRT's and most likely NOT being sent data as RGB, but as composite. They tended to put cheap TV tubes in these things, not actual computer quality monitors, so things like RGB colour repro may have had artifacting, level compensation, etc, etc...

That's a wild guess -- but an educated one. A LOT of games in MAME don't look as good on a modern display as they did on the real hardware, taking the RGB interpretations of the chips literally could be the cause.

 

[SimplerDays]

Does anyone know why Sega System 16 arcade games have such strange color

We like to say "unique".....lest we offend Sega.

 

[Capt. 2110]

Or they rise from their grave.

 

[deathshadow]

Or they rise from their grave.

Is it wrong I now have that pesky tune stuck in my head... played that WAY too much on my SMS.

 

[dabone]

I figure it probably had something to do with the displays being used being CRT's and most likely NOT being sent data as RGB, but as composite.

I collected and repaired arcade games for many years, and never saw a color game that didn't use rgb.
The only composite games I ever had were the old black and white ones from the 70s.
(Tank, night driver, and atari football were the ones I owned.)

99% of arcade games used 5v point to point RGB at 15khz.

Later,
dabone

 

[Capt. 2110]

Is it wrong I now have that pesky tune stuck in my head... played that WAY too much on my SMS.

No, I remembered the Star Wars theme from the Game Gear anytime I saw the cartridge.