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Game Boy vs NES vs C64 vs PICO-8

Every palette in the converter is a set of hard colour limits borrowed from a real machine, and each one gives your photo a completely different character. Here's a run through them, with the same two images converted in every palette so you can compare them properly, and a fair warning that I'm not remotely neutral about one of them.

By Richard Wallace · Published 5 August 2026 · Updated 5 September 2026

Why the palette changes everything

When you pixelate a photo, every colour gets mapped to the nearest one the palette allows. Four colours forces dramatic simplification and a bold, graphic look. A few dozen keeps far more of the original nuance. So the palette isn't just a tint, it decides how much of your photo actually survives. Fun fact from building this: going back through these palettes, I'd genuinely forgotten how few colours we had to play with back in the day.

The contenders

The same sunset in every palette

A sunset illustration, 512 pixels wide, at pixel size 8 throughout. Sunsets are a good test because they have a smooth gradient, a bright highlight and dark silhouettes, and every palette handles that combination differently.

And a scene with more colour in it

The sunset is mostly purples and oranges, so here's a synthetic test scene with a blue-to-orange sky, green hills, a blue sea and five spheres in red, orange, green, blue and peach. This one shows how each palette copes with saturated colour and with subtle shading.

Game Boy: four shades of green

The original 1989 Game Boy showed just four shades, all in that olive-to-lime green. With so little to work with, everything comes down to light and shadow rather than colour, which makes it brilliant for portraits and anything high-contrast. In the test scene the five differently coloured spheres become five nearly identical spheres, told apart only by their highlights, and the gradient sky turns into hard bands. It's also the most instantly recognisable retro look going. Reach for it when you want maximum nostalgia and a calm, single-colour mood, or when you're going for the Game Boy Camera look.

NES: the sensible all-rounder

The NES palette is the biggest on the site, and that extra range keeps skin, clothes and backgrounds telling themselves apart. Look at the test scene: the sky steps cleanly from blue to orange, and each sphere keeps its own colour and its shading. Photos of people stay readable while still looking unmistakably 8-bit. If you're not sure what to pick and there's a person in the shot, this is usually the safe bet. Its one weakness is a lack of browns and olives, so autumn scenes and wood tend to drift orange.

ZX Spectrum: bold and British

The Speccy, a cornerstone of 1980s UK gaming, worked from a small set of bright, saturated colours. There are no muted tones at all, so every block has to pick a primary or a secondary. The result is loud and poster-like: in the test scene the sky becomes blue, magenta and yellow bands and the sun goes pure white. Use it when you want your pixel art to shout rather than whisper, and give it saturated subjects to work with.

Commodore 64: my favourite, and I'll admit it's personal

Full disclosure: the C64 was my second ever computer and the place I first started coding, aged seven. So I was never going to be objective here. But it earns its spot on merit too. That 16-colour palette has a lovely warmth to it, all soft blues, warm browns and gentle accents, and it tends to flatter everyday photos and skin in a way the harsher palettes don't. It does have a quirk worth knowing: with three greys in the palette, muted colours get pulled towards grey, which is why the upper sky in the test scene goes flat grey while the spheres look gorgeous. If you want a retro look that still feels cosy, this is the one.

PICO-8: the modern favourite

PICO-8 is a present-day "fantasy console" whose 16 carefully chosen colours have become a staple for indie pixel artists. They're balanced and friendly, sitting somewhere between authentic vintage and clean modern design, and because the palette was designed rather than dictated by a video chip it handles the awkward cases best: look at the peach sphere, which PICO-8 renders better than any other palette. Great for avatars and anything you want to feel current rather than strictly old-school.

CGA: bold early-PC graphics

IBM's Colour Graphics Adapter gave early PCs a famously tiny palette, most memorably black, cyan, magenta and white. It's stark and almost neon, not subtle in the slightest. The test scene loses nearly all of its colour information: sky and sun go magenta and white, land and sea go black. Save it for high-contrast photos that can carry that kind of drama, or for anything deliberately synthwave.

Black & White and Original

Two more to round things off. Black & White strips the image down to pure monochrome by thresholding brightness at the midpoint, for the most extreme, earliest-computer feel, so keep it for very high-contrast subjects. Original colours skips the palette mapping entirely and just pixelates, keeping your photo's own colours for a clean, modern block effect.

If you just want a quick answer

• Portrait of a person: NES, PICO-8, Commodore 64 or Game Boy.
• Avatar or profile picture: PICO-8 or Game Boy.
• Landscape or sky: NES.
• Bold, poster-like image: ZX Spectrum or CGA.
• Warm, everyday photo: Commodore 64 (obviously).
• Clean, modern pixelation: Original colours.

There's no wrong pick, though. The best palette is just whichever one gives you the feeling you're after, so when in doubt, run the same photo through three or four and compare. And if you want the exact hex codes for any of them, each palette has its own reference page.