My choice was MSX, simply because I wanted to program and MSX was much easier to program for. With support for graphics, sprites and music in BASIC it was very easy to create simple games, and I did that a lot. The C64 was a very good computer (especially for the price) but not very userfriendly.
C64 has more greys that can form a transition between, say, red and cyan, green and magenta, yellow and blue. Also the colours of the C64 are less saturated, less candy colour so to say, making it easier to use with the other colours to form new gradients.
C64 colors are dull. That gives the games a grayish atmosphere. I do not like.
Most of the music is done with cooing effects. I do not like it either.
MSX hardware are quality, very very varied and very expansible. I like it!
And, I like Japanese games of the time.
Yzi’s point was not that the C64 palette was good for all purposes, or liked by everyone (I don’t at least), but that the colour selection has some artistic coherence. Consider for example a palette consisting of pastel colours, not good if you need a bright red, but as long as you stick to the graphics style of pastel colours you get great results.
Rather than a chip designer picking some arbitrary values that seemed fine or logical to him… Which I think applied to most computer system palettes from the 80s, with the C64 being a notable exception. Though the TMS9918 palette is not the worst, at least it’s not as mathematically logical but artistically useless as say the Spectrum’s palette.
c64 one is well known to be not a good palette with all color washed out
Says who? Not suitable for what purpose? To me it's very nice to look at.
Time ago i ve read an interview with one if. The vic ii chip designers.
When asked about the ugly color palette he said that colours were choosen by the priority to save the number of resistors reusing the mac number and reducing the die size instead of a artistic or useful choice of colors combinations
Says who? Not suitable for what purpose? To me it's very nice to look at.
Time ago i ve read an interview with one if. The vic ii chip designers.
When asked about the ugly color palette he said that colours were choosen by the priority to save the number of resistors reusing the mac number and reducing the die size instead of a artistic or useful choice of colors combinations
I'm afraid that not nearly as much effort went into the color selection as you think. Since we had total control over hue, saturation and luminance, we picked colors that we liked. In order to save space on the chip, though, many of the colors were simply the opposite side of the color wheel from ones that we picked. This allowed us to reuse the existing resistor values, rather than having a completely unique set for each color.
MSX palette allows you to make games more colorful and cheerful. On MSX1, it is the constraints of proximity which limit the artistic creations and for certain types of games, not the choice of colors. There are several things criticizable on MSX but not the colors.
