Game Boy vs NES vs PICO-8: Choosing the Right Retro Palette

By ImgScale Team  ·  June 2026 · 6 min read · by kizura

The palette is the most impactful single setting in the Pixel Art Converter. It determines the entire "era feel" of the output — the difference between a muddy result and one that looks like it came straight off a real retro console. This guide walks through every built-in palette with examples and recommendations.

How palettes work

When you select a palette, the converter maps every pixel in the downscaled grid to its nearest color in that palette using a perceptual distance formula (redmean weighting, which better matches human color perception than simple Euclidean RGB distance). The fewer colors in the palette, the more dramatic and "retro" the result — but also the more information is lost.

Dithering (Floyd–Steinberg or Ordered) can partially recover lost gradients by using patterns of different palette colors to simulate intermediate shades. It's worth trying dithering with any palette that has fewer than 8 colors.

Game Boy — 4 shades of green

The Game Boy palette is 4 shades of green ranging from near-black (#0f380f) to pale yellow-green (#9bbc0f). It's the most restricted palette in the set, but produces the most recognizable and evocative results for anyone who grew up with early handheld gaming.

Works best for

• Portraits and faces — surprisingly effective. The four luminance steps map cleanly to shadows, midtones, and highlights in a face. This is why original Pokémon sprites were so expressive despite the limitation.
• Nature scenes — landscapes with green vegetation naturally use similar hues, so the palette matches the content.
• Icons and simple graphics — the strong contrast between the four shades makes simple shapes very readable.

Add dithering

With only 4 colors, Floyd–Steinberg dithering makes a substantial difference — it can simulate 8–12 apparent shades by mixing adjacent pixels. Try comparing the same portrait with and without dithering on this palette.

PICO-8 — 16 vivid colors

PICO-8's 16-color palette is intentionally saturated and graphic. It was designed for the PICO-8 fantasy console (a fictional retro gaming platform) and prioritizes visual pop over photographic accuracy. Colors include vivid red, neon green, bright blue, pink, and orange — with only a handful of neutrals.

Works best for

• Illustrations and character art — the bright, saturated colors look great on drawn content and anime-style images.
• Game assets — anything destined for a PICO-8 game needs this palette exactly.
• Colorful photos — photos with vivid primary colors (red flowers, blue sky, yellow objects) map naturally to the palette.
• Social media graphics — the high contrast and bright colors stand out in feeds.

Doesn't work well for

• Portraits — skin tones don't have a natural match. The nearest colors tend to be orange or pink, which can look unnatural without heavy dithering.
• Muted, desaturated photography — the vivid palette oversaturates everything.

NES — 43 colors, the most nuanced

The NES palette has 43 colors (the actual NES hardware supported 54, but many were duplicates or near-black — the implementation uses the 43 most useful). It's the most flexible retro palette: enough colors to render skin tones, sky blues, and earth tones with reasonable fidelity while still looking distinctly "8-bit."

Works best for

• Portraits — the NES has better skin tone coverage than PICO-8. The warm browns and pinks render faces more naturally.
• Complex scenes — landscapes, interiors, and multi-element compositions benefit from having 43 shades to draw on.
• Character sprites — the classic NES game sprite aesthetic. Add dithering for smoother shading.
• Most general pixel art — when you want a retro look but need more than PICO-8's 16 colors, NES is the right step up.

CGA — the harsh 4-color PC palette

CGA (Color Graphics Adapter) is the most visually distinctive and polarizing palette — cyan, magenta, white, and black. It looks harsh and artificial on almost everything, which is exactly the point. It's a deliberate aesthetic choice, not a practical one.

Works best for

• Abstract and graphic art — content where the extreme color limitation is the visual interest itself.
• Retro computing nostalgia — recreating the look of early 1980s PC games and graphics.
• High-contrast objects — anything where shape matters more than color. Combined with dithering, the three-color gradient can produce surprisingly readable results.

1-bit — pure black and white

Two colors: near-black (#141414) and near-white (#fafafa). The most extreme palette possible.

Works best for

• With Floyd–Steinberg dithering — this combination produces a halftone-like effect that's surprisingly detailed. It's essentially how old newspaper photos were printed.
• High-contrast silhouettes — subjects with strong light/dark separation (person against bright sky, black text on white).
• Woodcut / linocut aesthetic — with Ordered dithering the pattern looks like a print technique.
• Icons and logos — for content that needs to work in a single color.

Auto — median-cut from the image itself

The Auto palette uses median-cut quantization to extract the N most representative colors from your specific image. The color count slider (2–64) controls how many colors the algorithm finds. This is not a fixed hardware palette — it's a custom palette generated from each image.

When to use Auto

• When you want a pixel art aesthetic without a specific retro hardware feel
• When the image has colors that don't fit any fixed palette (purple flowers, teal ocean)
• When you need more control over the exact color count
• For animated GIFs where you want the palette to match the specific content of your animation

Color count guidelines

• 4–8 colors — very retro feel, similar to fixed palettes
• 16–24 colors — the sweet spot for most pixel art conversions
• 32–48 colors — more detail, less strictly "pixel art," good for GIFs
• 64 colors — maximum — barely looks like pixel art at fine resolution settings

Which palette to pick

Related: Complete Pixel Art Guide · Dithering Explained