List of 8-bit computer hardware graphics

This is a list of notable 8-bit computer color palettes, and graphics, which were primarily manufactured from 1975 to 1985. Although some of them use RGB palettes, more commonly they have 4, 16 or more color palettes that are not bit nor level combinations of RGB primaries, but fixed ROM/circuitry colors selected by the manufacturer. Due to mixed-bit architectures, the n-bit distinction is not always a strict categorization. Another common mistake is that some assume that a color palette of a given computer is what it can display all at once. Resolution is also a crucial aspect when criticizing an 8-bit computer, as many offer different modes with different amounts of colors on screen, and different resolutions, with the intent of trading off resolution for color, and vice versa.

World System Teletext

Level 1

uses a 3-bit RGB, 8-color palette. Teletext has 40×25 characters per page of which the first row is reserved for a page header. Every character cell has a background color and a text color. These attributes along with others are set through control codes which each occupy one character position. Graphics characters consisting of 2×3 cells can used following a graphics color attribute. Up to a maximum of 72×69 blocky pixels can be used on a page.

Apple

Apple II series

The Apple II series features a 16-color composite video palette, based on the YIQ color space used by the NTSC color TV system.
The Apple II features "lowres" and "hires" modes.
The Apple II features "lo-res" and "hi-res" modes. The 40x48 pixel lo-res mode allowed 15 different colors plus a duplicate gray. *The majority of Apple graphic applications used the hi-res mode, which had 280×192 pixels. The hi-res mode allowed six colors: black, white, blue, orange, green and purple.

Atari

Atari 400/800/XL/XE

The early Atari 400 and 800 computers use a palette of 128 colors, using 4 bits for chrominance, and 3 for luminance. Screen modes may vary from 320×192 to 40×24, using 2 or 4 simultaneous colors, or 80×192 using 16 colors. After 2 years the CTIA graphics chip was replaced with the GTIA chip thus increasing the palette to 256 colors.
The ANTIC chip in the Atari 8-bit family computers has an instruction set to run programs which permits many more colors on the screen at once. There are a number of possible software-driven graphics modes.

Mattel Aquarius

The Mattel Aquarius computer has only a text mode with 40×24 characters, which graphic mode is obtained from low resolution blocks, providing an 80×72 resolution. The color attribute area is also on this 40×24 characters area, and used from a pixel group of 2×3. The colors used in the palette are fixed and 16.

Commodore

For all the following computers of this brand, the U and V coordinates for the composite video colors are always the cosine and the sine, respectively, of angles multiple of 22.5 degrees, as the engineers were inspired by the NTSC color wheel, a radial way to figure out the U and V coordinates of points equidistant from the center of the chroma plane, the gray. Consumers in Europe considered the Commodore colors to be more "washed out" and less vivid than those provided by computers such as the ZX Spectrum.

PET/CBM

The Commodore PET series of home computers, which came with a built-on monitor, could only display monochrome characters, as it had no graphics capabilities at all, if one does not consider monochromatic "graphical" characters-based imagery.

VIC-20

The Commodore VIC-20 features an MOS Technology VIC chip which produces a 16-color composite video palette. The palette lacks any intermediate shade of gray, and it has only 5 levels of luminance.
The VIC-20 lacks any true graphic mode, but a 22×11 text mode with 200 definable characters of 8×16 bits each arranged as a matrix of 20×10 characters is usually used instead, giving a 3:2/5:3 pixel aspect ratio, 160×160 pixels, 8-color "high-res mode" or a 3:1/10:3 pixel aspect ratio, 80×160 pixels, 10-color "multicolor mode".
In the 8-color high-res mode, every 8×8 pixels can have the background color or a free foreground color, both selectable among the first eight colors of the palette. In the 10-color multicolor mode, a single pixel of every 4×8 block may have any of four colors: the background color, the auxiliary color, the same color as the overscan border or a free foreground color, both selectable among the first eight colors of the palette.
On some models of the system, there are nine levels of luminance:
But on other models, there are only five levels of luminance:

C-64

The MOS Technology VIC-II is used in the Commodore 64, and features a 16-color YPbPr composite video palette. This palette is largely based on that of the VIC, but it substitutes three colors by three levels of gray. When displayed over an analog NTSC composite video output, the actual resulting colors are more vivid.
The Commodore 64 has two graphic modes: Multicolor and High Resolution.
In the Multicolor 160×200, 16-color mode, every cell of 4×8, 2:1 aspect ratio pixels can have one of four colors: one shared with the entire screen, the two background and foreground colors of the corresponding text mode character, and one more color also stored in the color RAM area, all of them freely selectable among the entire palette.
In the High Resolution 320×200, 16-color mode, every cell of 8×8 pixels can have one of the two background and foreground colors of the correspondent text mode character, both freely selectable among the entire palette.
On most models of the Commodore 64, there are nine levels of luminance:

C-16 and Plus/4

The MOS Technology TED was used in the Commodore 16 and Commodore Plus/4. It has a palette of 121 composite video colors consisting of sixteen hues at eight luminance levels. Black is the same color at every luminance level, so there are not 128 different colors. On the Commodore Plus/4, twelve colors formed a "default" palette of sorts accessible through keyboard shortcuts; these colors are underlined in the table below.
The Commodore 16 and Commodore Plus/4 have two graphic modes very similar to those of the Commodore 64: Multicolor and High Resolution.
In the Multicolor 160×200, 121-color mode, every cell of 4×8, 2:1 aspect ratio pixels can have one of four colors: two shared with the entire screen and the two background and foreground colors of the correspondent text mode character, all of them freely selectable among the entire 121-color palette.
In the High Resolution 320×200, 121-color mode, every cell of 8×8 pixels can have one of the two background and foreground colors of the corresponding text mode character, both freely selectable among the entire 121-color palette.

Tandy

Tandy Color Computer 3

The Tandy Color Computer 3 could display all of the modes of the Tandy Color Computer 1 and 2, except the Semigraphics modes, plus resolutions of 160, 256, 320, or 640 pixels wide by 192 to 225 lines from a palette of 64 colors. The 320 mode allowed 16 simultaneous colors, while the 640 mode allowed 4.

Thomson

For Thomson computers, a popular brand in France, the most common display modes are 320×200, with 8×1 attribute cells with 2 colors. The Thomson TO7 can only display the 8 "saturated" colors. The Thomson TO7/70 and Thomson MO5 have the 16 color palette shown below as a fixed palette. On later models, these 16 colors can be chosen from 4096 and other video modes are available, removing the block constraints but reducing either the color count or the horizontal resolution.

0 — black

1 — blue

2 — red

3 — magenta

4 — green

5 — cyan

6 — yellow

7 — white

Examples

BBC Micro

has 8 display modes, with resolutions like 640×256, 320×256 and 160×256. No display modes have cell attribute clashes. The palette available has only 8 physical colors, plus a further 8 flashing colors, and the display modes can have 16, 4 or 2 simultaneous colors.

0 — black

1 — blue

2 — red

3 — magenta

4 — green

5 — cyan

6 — yellow

7 — white

Sinclair

ZX Spectrum

The ZX Spectrum computers use a variation of the 4-bit RGBI palette philosophy. This results in each of the colors of the 3-bit palette to have a basic and bright variant, with the exception of black. This was accomplished by having a maximum voltage level for the bright variant, and a lower voltage level for the basic variant. Due to this, black is the same in both variants.
The attribute byte associated to every 8×8 pixel cell dedicates : three bits for the background color; three bits for the foreground color; one bit for the bright variant for both, and one bit for the flashing effect. So the colors are not selectable as indices of a true palette.
The color numbers can be employed with the following statements to choose:

BORDER n, the color for the surrounding area outside the pixel graphical area.
PAPER n, the background color for an 8×8 pixel cell.
INK n, the foreground color for an 8×8 pixel cell.
SC-QL

SAM Coupé

The 128 color master palette used by the SAM Coupé is produced via a unique method — it effectively contains 2 groups of 64 "RGB" colors of mildly different intensity, and ultimately derived from a 512 color space. The closest equivalent in more popular and well-known machines would be the Commodore-Amiga's 64-color "Extra Half-Brite" mode.
Two bits are used for each of Red, Green and Blue and give a similar result to a normal 6-bit RGB palette ; the seventh bit encodes for "brightness", which has a similar but more subtle effect to the Spectrum, increasing the output of all three channels by half the intensity of the lower bits of the main six. The layout of the byte that encodes each color is complicated and appears like a Spectrum color nybble transferred to a full byte's width, and an extra RGB bit-triplet then prefixed to it, with the MSB left unused.

Amstrad

CPC series

The Amstrad CPC 464/664/6128 series of computers generates the available palette with 3 levels for every RGB primary. Thus, there are 27 different RGB combinations, from which 16 can be simultaneously displayed in low resolution mode, four in medium resolution mode and two in high resolution mode.
Simulations of actual images on the Amstrad's color monitor in each of the modes follows. A cheaper green monochrome display was also available from the manufacturer; in this case, the colors are viewed as a 16-tone green scale, as shown in the last simulated image, as it interprets the overall brightness of the full color signal, instead of only considering the green intensity as might, e.g., the Philips CM8833 line.
The number in parentheses means the primary ink number for the Locomotive BASIC PEN, PAPER and INK statements. Inks can also have a secondary color number, meaning they flash between two colors. By default, ink #14 alternates between colors 1 and 24 and ink #15 alternates between colors 11 and 16. In addition, the paper defaults to ink #0 and the pen to ink #1, meaning yellow text on a dark blue background.

MSX systems

Original MSX

The MSX compatible computers feature a Texas Instruments TMS9918 chip which uses a proprietary 15-color composite color encoded palette plus a transparent color, intended to be used by the hardware sprites and simple video overlay. When used as an ordinary background color, it is rendered using the same color as the screen border.
The MSX series has two graphic modes. The MSX BASIC Screen 3 mode is a low-resolution mode with 15 colors, in which every pixel can be any of the 15 available colors. Screen mode 2 is a high-resolution mode with 15 colors, in which each of every eight consecutive pixels can be one of two out of the 15 available colors.

MSX2

The MSX2 series features a Yamaha V9938 video chip, which manages a 9-bit RGB palette and has some extended graphic modes. Although its graphical capabilities are similar, or even better than of those of 16-bit personal computers, MSX2 and MSX2+ are pure 8-bit machines.
Screen mode 6 is a 512×212-pixel mode with a 4-color palette chosen from the available 512 colors.
Screen modes 5 and 7 are high-resolution 256×212-pixel and 512×212-pixel modes, respectively, with a 16-color palette chosen from the available 512 colors. Each pixel can be any of the 16 selected colors.
Screen mode 8 is a high-resolution 256×212-pixel mode with an 8-bit color depth, giving a palette of 256 colors. From the MSB to LSB, there are three green bits, three red bits, and two blue bits. This mode uses half of the available colors overall, and can be considered a palette in its own right.

MSX2+

The MSX2+ series features a Yamaha V9958 video chip which manages a 15-bit RGB palette internally encoded in YJK and has additional screen modes. Although its graphical capabilities are similar, or even better than of those of 16-bit personal computers, MSX2 and MSX2+ are pure 8-bit machines. YJK color encoding can be viewed as a lossy compression technique; in the RGB to YJK conversion, the average red and green levels are preserved, but blue is subsampled. As a result of every four pixels sharing a chroma value, in mode 12 it is not possible to have vertical lines of a single color. This is only possible in modes 10 and 11 due to the additional 16-color direct palette. This can be used to mix 16 indexed colors with a rich colorful background, in what can be considered a primitive video overlay technique.
Screen modes 10 & 11 – 12,499 YJK colors plus a 16-color palette. In this mode, the YJK technique encodes 16 levels of luminance into the four LSBs of each pixel and 64 levels of chroma, from −32 to +31, shared across every four consecutive pixels and stored in the three higher bits of the four pixels. If the fifth bit of the pixel is set, then the lower four bits of the pixel points to an index in the 16-color palette; otherwise, they specify the YJK luminance level of the pixel.
Screen mode 12 is similar to modes 10 and 11, but uses five bits to encode 32 levels of luminance for every pixel, thus it does not use an additional palette and, with YJK encoding, 19,268 different colors can be displayed simultaneously with 8-bit color depth.

Fujitsu

's FM-77 AV 40, released in 1986, uses an 18-bit RGB palette. Any 64,000 out of 262,144 colors can be displayed simultaneously at the 320×200 resolution, or 8 out of 262,144 colors at the 640×400 resolution.

IBM PC/XT and compatible systems

The original IBM PC launched in 1981 features an Intel 8088 CPU which has 8-bit data bus technology, though internally the CPU has a fully 16-bit architecture. It was offered with a Monochrome Display Adapter or a Color Graphics Adapter. The MDA is a text mode-only display adapter, without any graphic ability beyond using the built-in code page 437 character set, and employed an original IBM green monochrome monitor; only black, green and intensified green could be seen on its screen. Then, only the CGA had true graphic modes.
The IBM PC XT model, which succeeded the original PC in 1983, has an identical architecture and CPU to its predecessor, only with more expansion slots and a hard disk equipped as standard. The same two video cards, the MDA and the CGA, remained available for the PC XT, and no upgraded video hardware was offered by IBM until the EGA, which followed the introduction of the IBM Personal Computer/AT, with its full 16-bit bus design, in 1984.

CGA

The Color Graphics Adapter outputs what IBM called "digital RGB". CGA supports a maximum of 16 colors. However, its 320×200 graphics mode is restricted to fixed palettes containing only four colors, and the 640×200 graphic mode is only two colors. 16 colors are only available in text mode or the "tweaked text" 160×100 mode. A different set of 16 colors is available in composite mode with an NTSC composite monitor.
The full standard RGBI palette is a variant of the 4-bit RGBI schema. Although the RGBI signals each have only two states, the CGA color monitor decodes them as if RGB signals had four levels. Darker colors are the basic RGB 2nd level signals except for brown, which is dark yellow with the level for the green component halved. Brighter colors are made by adding a uniform intensity one-level signal to every RGB signal of the dark ones, reaching the 3rd level, and in this case yellow is produced as if the brown were ordinary dark yellow.
The color numbers above are not arbitrary; they are based on the following bitmask:
*A few earlier non-IBM compatible CGA monitors lack the circuitry to decode color numbers as of four levels internally, and they cannot show brown and dark gray. The above palette is displayed in such monitors as follows:

16-color palette modes
2-color palette mode

In the 640×200 graphic mode, every pixel has only a single bit. A value of 0 is always black, while a value of 1 is the color set in the bits 0 to 3 of the CRT Color Selector Register. The foreground color can be set with a call to the function 0Bh of the BIOS's INT 10h. The default foreground color is white.

4-color palette modes

In the 320×200 graphics mode, every pixel has two bits. A value of 0 is always a selectable background-plus-border color, and the three remaining values 1 to 3 are indices to one of the predefined color palette entries.
The selection of a palette is a bit complex. There are two BIOS 320×200 CGA graphics modes: modes 4 and 5. Mode 4 has the composite color burst output enabled, and mode 5 has it disabled. Mode 5 is intended mainly for a monochrome composite video monitor, but because of a specific intentional feature of the CGA hardware, it also has a different palette for an RGBI color monitor. For mode 4, two palettes can be chosen: green/red/brown and cyan/magenta/white; the difference is the absence or presence of the blue signal in all three colors. The palette for BIOS video mode 5 is always cyan/red/white: blue is always on, and red and green each are controlled directly by one of the two bits of the pixel color value. For each of these three palette options, a low or high intensity palette can be chosen with bit 4 of the aforementioned Color-Select Register: a value of 0 means low intensity and 1 means high intensity. The selected intensity setting simply controls the "I" output signal to the RGBI monitor for all colors in the palette. As a result, the green-red-brown palette appears as bright-green/bright-red/yellow when high intensity is selected. The combination of color-burst enable/disable selection, palette selection, and intensity selection yields a total of 6 different possible palettes for CGA 320×200 graphics.

PCjr and Tandy 1000 series

The IBM PCjr features a "CGA Plus" video subsystem, consisting mainly of a 6845 CRTC and an LSI video chip known as the "Video Gate Array", that can show all 16 CGA colors simultaneously on screen in the extended low-res graphic modes. The near-compatible Tandy 1000 series features almost 100% PCjr-compatible video hardware implemented in a Tandy proprietary chip. This graphics adapter is better known by the name Tandy Graphics Adapter, because the PCjr was short-lived but the Tandy 1000 line was quite popular for many years. The video mode capabilities of early-model Tandy 1000 computers are exactly the same as the PCjr's.
The PCjr adds three video modes to the CGA mode set: 160×200 16-color "low-resolution" graphics, 320×200 16-color "medium-resolution" graphics, and 640×200 4-color "high-resolution" graphics. All PCjr/Tandy 1000 graphics modes can reassign any color index to any palette entry, allowing free selection of all palette
colors in modes with fewer than 16 colors and enabling color cycling effects in all modes. The PCjr also offers a graphics blink function which causes 8 colors to alternate between the low and high halves of the 16-color palette at the text blink rate.

Side-by-side comparison

Since there are many 8-bit computers to compare, a comparison table has been compiled to make comparing the systems easier.

Computer	Picture sample	Entire palette	Number of colors on screen	Resolution
Apple II	Hi-res: Lo-res:	Hi-res: Lo-res:	6, or 16	280x192 in high resolution or 40x48 in low resolution
Atari 8-bit line	Mode 15 :		9 colors per scanline on mode 15 via masking the 4 sprites for colors, and interrupts.	Ranges from 320x192, with 1 color, to 80x192 with 9 colors.
Mattel Aquarius			16 colors	40x24 characters
BBC Micro	Popular articles Javier Milei - Argentine libertarian economist, author, radio conductor and public speaker sympathetic to the Austrian School of economic thought. He became widely known for his regular ... Jimmy Carter - American politician, philanthropist, and former farmer who served as the 39th president of the United States from 1977 to 1981. A member of the Democratic Party, he previ... UEFA Euro 2024 - The 2024 UEFA European Football Championship , commonly referred to as UEFA Euro 2024 or simply Euro 2024 , will be the 17th edition of the UEFA European Championship, the quadrennial internationa... Argentina - country located mostly in the southern half of South America. Sharing the bulk of the Southern Cone with Chile to the west, the country is also b... Sam Altman - American entrepreneur, investor, programmer, and blogger. He is the former president of Y Combinator and now the CEO of OpenAI. Early life and education. ... Rosalynn Carter - American who served as First Lady of the United States from 1977 to 1981 as the wife of President Jimmy Carter. For decades, she has been a leading advocate for numerou... Next Argentine presidential election - Next Argentine presidential election - presidential election in Argentina.... Popular movies The Hunger Games (film) - 2012 American dystopian action thriller science fiction-adventure film directed by Gary Ross and based on Suzanne Collins’s 2008 novel of the same name. It is the first insta... untitled Captain Marvel sequel - part of Marvel Cinematic Universe.... Killers of the Flower Moon (film project) - Killers of the Flower Moon - film project in United States of America. It was presented as drama, detective fiction, thriller. The film project starred Leonardo Dicaprio, Robert De Niro. Director of... Five Nights at Freddy's (film) - Five Nights at Freddy's - film published in 2017 in United States of America. Scenarist of the film - Scott Cawthon.... Popular video games Minecraft - sandbox video game developed by Mojang Studios. Created by Markus "Notch" Persson in the Java programming language and released as a public alpha for personal computers in 2... Grand Theft Auto V - 2013 action-adventure game developed by Rockstar North and published by Rockstar Games. It is the first main entry in the Grand Theft Auto series since 2008's Grand Theft ... Roblox - online game platform and game creation system that allows users to program games and play games created by other users. Founded by David Baszucki and Erik Cassel in 2004 and released in... Baldur's Gate III - upcoming role-playing video game developed and published by Larian Studios for Microsoft Windows and the Stadia streaming service. It is the third main game in the Baldur's ... Alan Wake - action-adventure video game developed by Remedy Entertainment and published by Microsoft Studios, released for the Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows. The story follows best-selling thri... Fortnite - online video game developed by Epic Games and released in 2017. It is available in three distinct game mode versions that otherwise share the same general gameplay and game engine: ... Super Mario RPG - is a role-playing video game developed by Square and published by Nintendo for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1996. It was directed by Yoshihiko Maekawa and Chihiro Fujioka and produced by... Popular books Book of Revelation - The Book of Revelation is the final book of the New Testament, and consequently is also the final book of the Christian Bible. Its title is derived from the first word of the Koine Greek text: apok... Book of Genesis - account of the creation of the world, the early history of humanity, Israel's ancestors and the origins... Gospel of Matthew - The Gospel According to Matthew is the first book of the New Testament and one of the three synoptic gospels. It tells how Israel's Messiah, rejected and executed in Israel, pronounces judgement on ... Michelin Guide - Michelin Guides are a series of guide books published by the French tyre company Michelin for more than a century. The term normally refers to the annually published Michelin Red Guide , the oldest... Psalms - The Book of Psalms , commonly referred to simply as Psalms , the Psalter or "the Psalms", is the first book of the Ketuvim , the third section of the Hebrew Bible, and thus a book of th... Ecclesiastes - Ecclesiastes is one of 24 books of the Tanakh , where it is classified as one of the Ketuvim . Originally written c. 450–200 BCE, it is also among the canonical Wisdom literature of the Old Tes... The 48 Laws of Power - non-fiction book by American author Robert Greene. The book... Popular television series The Crown (TV series) - historical drama web television series about the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, created and principally written by Peter Morgan, and produced by Left Bank Pictures and Sony Pictures Tel... Friends - American sitcom television series, created by David Crane and Marta Kauffman, which aired on NBC from September 22, 1994, to May 6, 2004, lasting ten seasons. With an ensemble cast sta... Young Sheldon - spin-off prequel to The Big Bang Theory and begins with the character Sheldon... Modern Family - American television mockumentary family sitcom created by Christopher Lloyd and Steven Levitan for the American Broadcasting Company. It ran for eleven seasons, from September 23... Loki (TV series) - upcoming American web television miniseries created for Disney+ by Michael Waldron, based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name. It is set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, shar... Game of Thrones - American fantasy drama television series created by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss for HBO. It... Shameless (American TV series) - American comedy-drama television series developed by John Wells which debuted on Showtime on January 9, 2011. It... OWIKI.org. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.