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COLUBK

Set the colour/luminance of the background.

COLUBK = $09

Colour/Luminance of Background

WRITE
Name
D7
D6
D5
D4
D3
D2
D1
D0
$09
COLUBK
COL3
COL2
COL1
COL0
LUM2
LUM1
LUM0
X

NTSC Palette

There are in effect 128 different colours, as D0 of colour registers is unused. The image below shows the results of the 256 possible values that can be selected. Although each pair appears to be slightly different, this is an optical illusion. They appear in pairs because D0 is ignored and so (for example) colour $34 and colour $35 are identical. Colour number goes down the rows, and luminance across the columns (so, row 3, column 4 - both counting from 0 - is colour value $34 and appears red on NTSC systems).

NTSCpalette2

PAL Palette

The PAL palette is a lot like the NTSC one. It also ignores the D0 bit for the luminance so there's only 128 "usable" values.
But thanks to the way it were implemented it only has 104 unique colors to chose from, the colors are also interleaved instead of being laid out nicely as with NTSC. So when you develop for PAL you should alter the values that you use for the palette.

PAL Palette

SECAM Palette

The SECAM palette was reduced to a simple 3-bit RGB, containing only 8 colours (black, blue, red, magenta, green, cyan, yellow and white) by mapping the hue (COL3-COL0) to luminance and ignoring the hue setting:

COL3
D7
COL2
D6
COL1
D5
COL0
D4

RGB1

Visible Colour
$0
$1
$2
$3
$4
$5
$6
$7
$8
$9
$A
$B
$C
$D
$E
$F
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
0
0
0
0
1
1
1
1
0
0
0
0
1
1
1
1
0
0
1
1
0
0
1
1
0
0
1
1
0
0
1
1
0
1
0
1
0
1
0
1
0
1
0
1
0
1
0
1
000000
1x1
2120FF
1x1
F03C79
1x1
FF50FF
1x1
7FFF01
1x1
7EFFFF
1x1
FFFF3F
1x1
FFFFFF
1x1
1x1
1x1
1x1
1x1
1x1
1x1
1x1
1x1
1x1
1x1
1x1
1x1
1x1
1x1
1x1
1x1

  1. List of video game console palettes.



see TIA
see Colour Palette
see TIA Colour Registers