What made the NES so interesting?
&gt; The NES is in some sense a composite-only system. While there is an RGB mod, it&#x27;s quite invasive[...]<p>This is something that a lot of even very plugged into retrogaming people don&#x27;t really get about the NES and RGB mods. I think it&#x27;s very counterintuitive for people now that there is no part of the system that operates in actual &#x27;color&#x27; information. The NES&#x27; video output is composite from start to finish[1], with palette entries corresponding to approximate output frequencies for the color subcarrier.<p>So there is no canonical palette for the NES - the colors produced by games varied by region, a little bit by unit, and especially because NTSC had trouble with stable color even by TV.<p>So people imagine that RGB or HDMI mods of the NES are somehow tapping into a missing layer of raw color information, but what it&#x27;s actually doing is intercepting communications with the PPU and modelling (on an fpga) an extra PPU that <i>does</i> operate in RGB, and then constructing a new video signal from that.<p>And then you have to pick a palette, because there isn&#x27;t just one.<p>I have an RGB modded NES (a US toploader) but I doubt I will ever buy or make another one. At this point I think it&#x27;s better to just use an upscaler, which will produce no less authentic a picture. The main benefit imo of the rgb mod is that there&#x27;s less interference so the picture is clearer, even if you just output reconstructed composite from it.<p>[1] There is actually a model of NES PPU that outputs RGB, it was used in the PlayChoice arcade machines (which generally used RGB monitors, not composite) and it has a palette that most people agree is ugly as sin.