Hey @zep,

I think it'd be really nice to allow us to swap in the 32-color Picotron palette, which has the 16-color PICO-8 palette plus the revised upper 16 colors that you've been carefully tweaking for Picotron's system palette.

I'm gonna bet that the iteration you're doing with them to improve usefulness would be really nice for PICO-8 games, and would additionally homologize the two platforms with respect to color palettes.

Maybe just a single bit somewhere that swaps out the secret palette for Picotron's 16..31 colors?

Or, I suppose, you could subdivide one of the two ranges. You'd still want an enable bit though, since people rely on index bits 4,5,6 not mattering.

In fact, what the enable bit could do would be to switch to using the same indices 0..31 Picotron uses, instead of 0..15 and 128..143 on PICO-8, and then that's just the Picotron system palette. Basically a Picotron-palette mode.

That'd make using the extra colors a lot less cumbersome than using the current secret palette, though the original secret palette could still live above 128 at the same time too, in which case all the enable bit would do would be to put picotron_pal[16..31] into pico8_pal[16..31] and everything else would remain the same.

I dunno, just throwing out ideas here. What do you think? Does any of this sound reasonable?

I'm not suggesting this is a bad idea, but what purpose would it serve beyond adding more colors to PICO-8?

Unless you're suggesting the PICO-8 UI be redesigned to use these new colors, I don't see how this would create consistency between the platforms. Since the Picotron palette isn't fixed, the look of games would still be inconsistent with PICO-8.

I agree with @Felice.

Anything or method that can make the transition easier, especially for us who want to see our Pico-8 carts run as smoothly as they can in new Picotron - I am all for.

Gold star to support.

@binaryeye

I read @zep talking about the Picotron OS palette, which is the 32 default colors the Picotron OS expects to use out of the 64 total colors.

The 32 OS colors start with the 16 PICO-8 colors and then there are 16 more that are different from the "secret" extra 16 on PICO-8. I saw zep say that he's spent a bunch of time iterating and trying to make Picotron's extra 16 better and more useful (i.e. making better ramps) when used with colors from the lower 16 colors both palettes share.

I just think it might be nice if PICO-8 devs could benefit from that iteration. The existing PICO-8 "secret" palette is definitely not perfect IMHO, having some colors that are too similar to others. That's why I'm interested in having access to something that works better.