neon death parade

Inspired by the mastery of limited color on display in these Policenauts screenshots, I made a toy over the past two days. It allows a user to create color palettes from the 12-bit RGB range the typical NEC PC-9801 was capable of displaying…or something pretty close to that, at any rate. The default palette size is 16 because that was the number of colors it could display simultaneously, but I’m not forcing anyone else to adhere to that.

I won’t care if you decide to try playing with palettes of 1000 colors or more, but your browser may be unhappy with you for a minute.

(And yes, I am aware—now—that Policenauts was made for the PC-9821. Oops.)

Potential future plans:

• Add palette to <canvas> so it can be copied/saved as an image instead of forcing the user to take a screenshot
• Allow for toggling between the “hover over color swatches for info” mode and the aforementioned <canvas> image
• Add a “colors similar to this one” section that will allow you to modify the color in your palette. Lighter, darker, more saturated, less saturated, hue shifts.

Who the fuck even knows:

• Reorder palette. I’m not sure I can improve this much without just switching to an s/v square plus color ribbon/circle, which kinda goes against the point of this exercise. (It’s also been done.)
• Increase browser compatibility. I don’t think old versions of IE matter enough to include hacks or downgrade jQuery, but we’ll see.

Enjoy. Feedback is welcome, though I don’t expect any. If you don’t want to filthy up your tumblr with reblogs, you are welcome to leave a comment, tweet at me, or email.