CGA color palette
The complete IBM Color Graphics Adapter palette — all 16 RGBI colors with exact hex codes, plus the actual graphics-mode palettes the hardware really produced. Click any swatch to copy its hex value.
The 16 RGBI colors
Brown, not dark yellow. Color index 6 is
#AA5500 on a genuine IBM 5153 monitor, which lowered the green component through dedicated circuitry. Many clone monitors lacked that circuit and rendered it as dark yellow #AAAA00. Toggle above to compare — this distinction trips up most palette references.
320×200 graphics mode
This is where most palette lists get CGA wrong. The 4-color graphics mode is not a free choice of four colors. The hardware provides fixed three-color palettes plus one freely chosen background, selected by two status-register bits — with an undocumented third palette available through mode 5.
Color reference table
| # | name | hex | RGB |
|---|
Frequently asked
- Why is CGA brown so unusual?
- Pure RGBI math would make color 6 dark yellow (#AAAA00). IBM considered that ugly and added a circuit in the 5153 monitor to halve the green signal for that specific color, producing brown (#AA5500).
- How many colors does CGA show at once?
- 16 in text mode; 4 in the 320×200 graphics mode (background + a fixed 3-color set); 2 in 640×200 high-resolution mode.
- What about composite/artifact colors?
- On an NTSC composite display, dot patterns blend into roughly 16 additional artifact colors that don't exist on an RGBI monitor. See CGA composite colors for those (decoded correctly, not sampled from RGBI). Looking for just the hex codes? See CGA color codes (hex).