Anatomy of the standard VGA 256-color palette

This video explains how the standard 256-color VGA palette works. (Also, the 16-color EGA palette by extension.)

This video contains audio: Speech in English, and speech in Finnish. The speech was generated with the Festival Speech Synthesis System version 1.96, using the us3-mbrola voice for English and suopuhe_fi_lj_diphone voice for Finnish.

This video is PART 2. In PART 1, you can see how this video was made. Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8x9Ya4izFaE

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• vga
• palette
• dos
• ms-dos
• microsoft
• ibm pc
• pc
• quickbasic
• svga
• mcga
• qbasic
• programming
• graphics
• history
• dosbox
• speech synthesis
• text-to-speech
• suopuhe
• mbrola

[JosephCollins]

As usual, this video was highly informative and interesting. Kind of odd that despite VGA being "256 colors", the last few entries are all black. Granted, this is 256 colors out of how many possible colors? Heh.

[Bisqwit]

@JosephCollins 256 out of 262144 (64×64×64) colors.

It is a palette, meaning different colors can be assigned arbitrary to each of the 256 slots. This was just what they are mapped to by default.

[FreeFireFull]

This palette does look rather useful for those who don't set their own palette or want to display EGA graphics using VGA

[Bisqwit]

The primary problem that I see with this palette, aside from the numerous duplicate color entries, is that it is not uniformly distributed with regards to visual differences. For example, there are only 24 entries for the fully saturated bright color entries (which are visually very different from each others), but there are 24 entries for the dark unsaturated colors (which all look almost the same). For dim and unsaturated colors, much fewer entries should be used, and for saturated ones, more.

[stickmakerman]

wow, nice!

[kademan13]

0_0 

[labobo]

Both videos were interesting but i would rather see more c++0x videos :)