Palettes

All TIC-80 games use a palette of 16 colors drawn from 24-bit colorspace (16 million possible colors). The TIC-80 default palette for all new cartridges is SWEETIE-16. The game's starting palette can be modified using the Sprite Editor.

Altering the Palette at Runtime

You can alter the palette at runtime using the poke command and poking into the PALETTE area of VRAM. You can replace the whole palette this way, or just a single color.

Swapping Palette Colors

For more temporary swaps (within a palette) PALETTE MAP VRAM is what you need. Let's say we have a sprite that's largely blue but now we'd like a variant that's red (replacing all the blue pixels with red). We don't need a second sprite for this - we can just update the palette map.

PALETTE_MAP = 0x3FF0
blue = 9
red = 2
poke4(PALETTE_MAP * 2 + blue, red) -- swap the colors
-- draw the sprite
poke4(PALETTE_MAP * 2 + blue, blue) -- swap them back

See also PALETTE MAP.

More than 16 Colors

By combining poke and SCN creatively you can potentially display up to 2,176 colors on screen simultaneously (16 colors x 136 scanlines). As always, each scanline is still restricted to 16 colors.

Example

• Sky gradient

Changing Colors in the Code Editor

Colors used in the code editor can be configured using the console config command.

See also:

• online TIC-80 palette-editing tool.

Palettes

SWEETIE-16

Color	Index	Hex
Black	0	1A1C2C
Purple	1	5D275D
Red	2	B13E53
Orange	3	EF7D57
Yellow	4	FFCD75
Light Green	5	A7F070
Green	6	38B764
Dark Green	7	257179
Dark Blue	8	29366F
Blue	9	3B5DC9
Light Blue	10	41A6F6
Cyan	11	73EFF7
White	12	F4F4F4
Light Grey	13	94B0C2
Grey	14	566C86
Dark Grey	15	333C57

Or in a form that can be pasted into the palette editor: 1a1c2c5d275db13e53ef7d57ffcd75a7f07038b76425717929366f3b5dc941a6f673eff7f4f4f494b0c2566c86333c57

DB16

Some very old cartridges may still use this palette for backwards compatibility.