The real retro PC palettes
Exact hex codes for the CGA, EGA, and VGA color palettes — modeled the way the hardware actually worked, including the details most references get wrong. Start with a palette below, or jump to the interactive tools.
Why another palette site? Most retro-color tools treat these as flat lists and get the hardware semantics wrong — the brown, the fixed graphics-mode palettes, the EGA 64-color derivation, composite artifact colors. crtcolor models what the hardware actually did. Every value here is verified against primary hardware references.
The tools
The interactive, hardware-correct versions — not toy approximations. All client-side; nothing is uploaded.
New: the composite simulator shows the same image on an RGB monitor versus an NTSC composite TV, side by side — with the artifact colors decoded from the real signal, not faked. It's the thing every other tool gets wrong. See how we model the hardware.
Still exploring
A couple of genuinely hard pieces remain on the bench: a VGA 256-color (mode 13h) palette editor, and the full CGA “1024-color” composite mode. They ship when they're correct, or not at all.