Modern games with 256-color palette
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Category: The Lounge
Forum Name: Diversions
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URL: https://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=18754
Printed Date: 12 September 2025 at 10:03am
Topic: Modern games with 256-color palette
Posted By: feiss
Subject: Modern games with 256-color palette
Date Posted: 25 April 2014 at 9:38am
Hi everyone!
I was wondering if there is any modern game that really use a maximum of 256 colours on screen, a fixed indexed palette. I guess it's really difficult to know, since we don't use old screen modes anymore..
Maybe this was asked in another thread, excuse me if that's the case. If not, it would be really nice to make a list in this thread.
Another question: do you know of any engine or library that helps to make games in indexed mode?
Cheers!
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Replies:
Posted By: inphy
Date Posted: 26 April 2014 at 9:04am
Don't know of any modern games, I'd be really surprised if there were any since it's much more work to work in 8-bit modes than 16-bit or higher. At least Allegro (up to 4.4) and SDL (haven't used) game development libraries can work with 8-bit modes and have a decent set of palette operations.
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Posted By: feiss
Date Posted: 27 April 2014 at 3:28am
Thanks! Didn't realize that SDL had a 8-bit mode
It's funny, because if you don't use this mode, there's no sense of color optimisation in pixel art sprites.. Doesn't matter if you have 30 sprites on screen with 10 colours each, that wouldn't work on a 256 colours palette..
Also, I miss the palette effects..
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Posted By: yrizoud
Date Posted: 28 April 2014 at 5:03am
SDL is very good for porting programs that were originally in 256 colors, because you can program as if your videocard was giving you a 8-bit mode - if it doesn't support it, the library performs the conversion. I can't see any performance hit, even on a 14-year old PC.
http://openxcom.org/ - OpenXcom uses 256-color mode (It lets you play the original XCOM / UFO). The game uses some palette cyclings sometimes, and palette "shading" for light levels.
http://pulkomandy.tk/projects/GrafX2 - Grafx2 is in 256-color mode, which makes it sometimes awkward to edit a 256-color image. On a brighter note, it was very easy to implement the viewing/editing of images with cycling colors.
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Posted By: feiss
Date Posted: 28 April 2014 at 6:17am
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Thanks yrizoud, openXcom uses sdl, and Grafx2 too. Technically seems the best option indeed.
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