GameBoy/VirtualBoy Palette

[Sunny Cassette]

I was looking for Super Mario Land sprites in Spriter Resource, when i notice one thing... that wasn't the right colors, i mean just look it:



Shouldn't looks like that, i think that should looks like this:



Better, don't you think? What i'm trying to say is that we need a color base to know what colors should have gameboy games... here i'll post the gameboy real palette:



And Virtual Boy too:



I'm not 100% sure that this are the correct palettes so let me know if i'm wrong, i want to fix the GameBoy/VirtualBoy sprites but first i need to know the right palette!

[SuperFlomm]

I looked at 3 different emulators to see what palette they use and this is my result:
   
As you can see the difference is very minor.

Left:
▉ #ffffff
▉ #aaaaaa
▉ #555555
▉ #000000

Right:
▉ #f8f8f8
▉ #a8a8a8
▉ #505050
▉ #000000

The palette on the right looks better in my opinion and you can actually see the white color on a white background. (Because it's not pure white.)

[Raccoon Sam]

I don't think there is a "palette" per se.
Correct me if I'm wrong but GB and VB hardware simply read the planar tile data and interpret 00 as no light passed, 01 as some light passed, 10 as more light passed and 11 as all light passed.
The emulator developers simply chose to represent these varying levels of light passed as different coloured pixels.

[puggsoy]

Pretty sure you're right, Sam. The best way to turn these into 24-bit colours would be just copying over the 2 bits over and over. So for instance 10 would become 1010 1010 1010 1010 1010 1010 = #aaaaaa. I would consider the first list that Flomm gave to be the most correct.

I would assume that it's a similar case for the Virtual Boy, but then restricted to the red channel:

▉ #ff0000
▉ #aa0000
▉ #550000
▉ #000000

I don't really know much about the Virtual Boy though so I could be wrong here.

[Sunny Cassette]

I looked at 3 different emulators to see what palette they use and this is my result:

As you can see the difference is very minor.

Left:
▉ #ffffff
▉ #aaaaaa
▉ #555555
▉ #000000

Right:
▉ #f8f8f8
▉ #a8a8a8
▉ #505050
▉ #000000

The palette on the right looks better in my opinion and you can actually see the white color on a white background. (Because it's not pure white.)

Soooo, the best palette would be the Right as you said? Or at least the best palette that we can get?

[SuperFlomm]

puggsoy's argument sounds pretty convincing. So these are probably the most accurate palettes.

▉ #ffffff
▉ #aaaaaa
▉ #555555
▉ #000000

▉ #ff0000
▉ #aa0000
▉ #550000
▉ #000000

[Deathbringer]

Does any emulator do the alternate Super Gameboy/Gameboy Color palettes? One of the palettes there (Left+B I think) is probably as close to the grayscale as we could get. And I think another did the greenscale from the original Gameboy too.

EDIT:

I found a version of VBA that actually lets me do the BIOS screen. The hex for the Left+B palette is:
White #F8F8F8
Light Gray #A0A0A0
Dark Gray #505050
Black #000000