Terrible Terrible Palettes

[JRoatch]

For the past year or so whenever I see discussions of the NES palette, especially demanding for accurate sRGB hex codes, I've had this impulse to make another deliberately bad NES palette. And I'm gonna talk about 7 of then I've made up.
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Mesen-default-preview.png

For comparison The above is the Default Mesen palette. With 4 Scenarios to illustrate the hotly debated blue/purple sky, Green yellow shades, difficult red purple lightness balance, and luma balance of blue/yellow.
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Impostor-preview.png

First up is what I consider most passable for a correct palette, but only if you look at the palette alone and out of context. This was actually generated with a palette generator meant for accuracy, but I modulated the brightness across hues and pumped up the saturation for good measure.
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Retro-Imitator-Preview.png

This one I think is a cool one. The Challenge make a 2-bit per component 6-bit RGB color-space (like EGA or SMS) and passable while having a unique color for every palette entry. Very reminiscent playchoice-10 palette. This is actually my 3rd revision.
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Burnt-preview.png

This also is in the 6-bit RGB color-space. The idea here is that Green Holds most of the brightness of a color, so just make green entirely the brightness! This is also when I discovered a golden rule to making even the most egregious palette passable: $20, $30 must be white; and $0d, $1d, $xe, $xf must be black; and $2d, $3d can be copies of $00, $10.

[JRoatch]

HSV-preview.png

This is what I imagine the palette would be if someone took a basic color wheel from MS Paint and went with the description of the NES palette as being a grid of 12 hues and 4 values.
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ChatGTP-preview.png

Speaking of just going with a naive text description
It all started when ChatGTP was being asked what it knew about the technical details of the NES and the it stated "The row 0 colors in the NES master palette, which are primarily shades of gray, ..." and was asked what the other rows were. An attempt was made to follow the resulting answer with HSV selections. A year later I took that produced palette and fitted it in the 12 color hue range in line with the golden rule I mentioned before.
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Real-Life-Preview.png

Same idea as Michael Bay vision palette. I tried extracting the YIQ results of a accurate generator with white levels adjusted for out of gamut blues. Then processed to fix the 'Y' and 'I' values to a constant amount per row, and modulated the 'I' component by a cosine.
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TMS9918a-Preview.png

TMS9918 generates signals by square waves directly in a NTSC signal, much like the 2C02. So I grabbed a random TMS9918 palette off the internet and attempted this. Not that great of an attempt.

By that way I know these will be instantly slurped up by Image Search potentially confusing more people about the true nature of the NES palette, but oh well we still have people unironically using a modified NESticle palette because it got featured on some content farm.

[Dwedit]

I've seen someone have a broken YCbCr capture from their (component-modded) NES where the Cb channel was missing. It ended up looking Pale Red and Teal/Cyan. Suspiciously like that Michael Bay palette.

[Yave Yu]

For me, I use neither emulator's default palette nor some custom palette such as Digital Prime and Wavebeam, they has many reason I don't like, mainly because a bit dark and less saturation. However, these existing palette helps me for making my custom palette. Used and modified your screenshot to show it :p

[JRoatch]

About a month ago UFO 50 came out, it's a game collection inspired by retro computer/console systems. The whole title shares a 32-color palette [source]. I figured to try arranging it into NES order. I tried to make both the forwards and backwards mappings look OK. The extra filler colors to pad from 32 to 54 colors was not given much thought.

UFO50-preview.png