List of 8-bit computer hardware palettes

This is a list of notable 8-bit color palettes, which were primarily manufactured from 1975 to 1985. Although some of them use RGB palettes, more commonly they have 4, 16 or more color palettes that are not bit nor level combinations of RGB primaries, but fixed ROM/circuitry colors selected by the manufacturer. Due to mixed-bit architectures, the n-bit distinction is not always a strict categorization.

World System Teletext Level 1 (1976) uses a 3-bit RGB, 8-color palette. Teletext has 40×25 characters per page of which the first row is reserved for a page header. Every character cell has a background color and a text color. These attributes along with others are set through control codes which each occupy one character position. Graphics characters consisting of 2×3 cells can used following a graphics color attribute. Up to a maximum of 72×69 blocky pixels can be used on a page.

The Apple II series features a 16-color composite video palette, based on the YIQ color space used by the NTSC color TV system.

The Apple II featured "lowres" and "hires" modes. The 40x48 pixel lowres mode allowed 15 different colors plus a duplicate gray. The majority of Apple graphic applications used the Hires mode, which had 280×192 pixels (effectively 140x192 on a color monitor). The Hires mode allowed six colors: black, white, blue, orange, green, and purple

The early Atari 400 and 800 computers use a palette of 128 colours (a bit similar to the one used on the Atari 2600 console, and the Commodore 16 and Plus 4), using 4 bits for chrominance, and 3 for luminance. Screen modes may vary from 320×192 (384x240 with overscan) to 40×24, using 2 or 4 simultaneous colours, or 80×192 (96x240 with overscan) using 16 colours. After 2 years (late 1981) the CTIA graphics chip was replaced with the GTIA chip thus increasing the palette to 256 colours (CTIA and GTIA).

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