HEXdidn't... - A Pixel Art Odyssey

Given that Westen House is essentially a horror game - albeit with a fairly simple,  cartoonish style for its sprites - one thing I definitely wanted to change was palette. The MSX's Mode 2 screen has a fixed palette of 16 colours that is somehow both bright and washed out, offering very little contrast between its shades. It also - like the ZX Spectru m - has two copies of black, even though - unlike MODE 2 on the SAM - it doesn't split the palette into two sets of 8 colours each, accessed by applying either BRIGHT 0 or BRIGHT 1 to PEN and PAPER slots #0 to #7. On the whole, it really doesn't seem like a particularly useful palette. Three shades of green, three shades of red/orange, two shades of blue, yellow and white/grey, cyan and a purply-pink on their own, and then those two instances of black. Bearing in mind the above is the MSX palette according to Multipaint , and not necessarily perfectly representative of what you'd see on actual hardware. I've certain...

Perhaps a little context, to start with. The SAM Coupé has a gamut of 128 colours, effectively bookended with two super-dark sets of the ZX Spectrum's palette – one marginally brighter than the other – at the very start of the list (slots 0-15) and another two – in the lightest shades available – at the very end of the list (slots 112-127). In between, there are 6 groups of 16 shades each of blue-, red-, magenta-, green-, cyan- and yellow-biased colours. Colour 0 is black, colour 127 is the brightest white available, while pure greys are split between each end – three at the darker end, three at the lighter. Just for fun, Mel Croucher – founder of Automata and author of The User's Guide for the SAM – came up with names for each and every one of the colours. Colours on the SAM are mixed with just four levels of Red, Green and Blue (2 bits per channel), with an optional BRIGHT bit (essentially a holdover from MODE 1's Spectrum compatibility) which can be applied across all ...