PICO-8 Color Palette: All 16 Hex Codes

The PICO-8 palette is sixteen fixed colors: #000000, #1D2B53, #7E2553, #008751, #AB5236, #5F574F, #C2C3C7, #FFF1E8, #FF004D, #FFA300, #FFEC27, #00E436, #29ADFF, #83769C, #FF77A8 and #FFCCAA. Unlike the Game Boy’s greens, these aren’t an approximation of old hardware. PICO-8 is a modern fantasy console, so its palette is an exact, deliberate design choice, which is part of why pixel artists like it so much.

The 16 PICO-8 colors #

PICO-8 refers to its colors by number, 0 through 15, rather than by name. Here they are in that conventional order, with the hex values as published on Lospec’s PICO-8 palette page:

The structure is what makes it work. The first eight are dark and muted, the second eight are bright and saturated, and several pairs line up as a shadow and a highlight of the same hue: #7E2553 with #FF77A8, #AB5236 with #FFA300, #008751 with #00E436, #1D2B53 with #29ADFF. That gives an artist ready-made two-step shading ramps, which is rare in a palette this small.

There’s also a usable skin range (#AB5236, #FF77A8, #FFCCAA, #FFF1E8) and a gray ramp (#000000, #5F574F, #C2C3C7, #FFF1E8), so faces and neutral surfaces both have somewhere to land.

What is PICO-8? #

PICO-8 is a fantasy console made by Lexaloffle: a piece of software that pretends to be a small games machine that never existed. It runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and Raspberry Pi and costs $14.99.

Its published specifications are deliberately tight:

• Display: 128 x 128 pixels, 16 colors
• Cartridge size: 32k
• Sound: 4-channel chip audio
• Sprites: 256 8x8 sprites
• Map: 128 x 32 tiles
• Code: P8 Lua, with a 4M virtual instructions per second CPU budget

The console includes built-in editors for code, music, sound, sprites and maps, and cartridges can be saved as PNG files and shared online.

Why only 16 colors? #

The limits are the product. Real 8-bit hardware had constraints because memory and chips were expensive, which is covered in why old games had limited colors. PICO-8 imposes similar limits on purpose, for two reasons that its users tend to agree on: small constraints make finishing a game realistic, and a fixed, well-chosen palette makes everything drawn on the system look coherent.

Sixteen colors is also a practical sweet spot for photo conversion. Four colors forces heavy dithering and loses most color information. Fifty or more starts looking like a low-quality photo. Sixteen keeps enough range for skin, sky and background while still reading unmistakably as pixel art.

Using the PICO-8 palette on photos #

This palette converts photos better than most authentic console palettes, because it was designed for range rather than dictated by hardware. A few things to expect:

• Skin lands well. The brown-to-peach ramp covers most skin tones, though it pushes everything slightly warm.
• Skies go to #29ADFF, which is a strong, saturated blue. Expect a bright, cartoonish sky rather than a subtle one.
• Greens split hard between #008751 and #00E436 with nothing in between, so foliage either dithers or bands.
• There’s no true mid-gray besides #5F574F and #C2C3C7, so overcast scenes can look flat.

Dithering matters more with 16 colors than with 50. In Pixelize, pick PICO-8 on the Color tab, then try Floyd or Atkinson on the Pixel tab and compare. Atkinson gives a crisper, higher-contrast result that suits the palette’s saturation. Floyd-Steinberg vs Atkinson dithering shows what each one does.

Raise contrast slightly before the palette is applied if your photo is soft. Because the eight dark colors and eight bright colors are so separated, a low-contrast photo tends to collapse into the dark half.

Using the palette in a pixel editor #

Most editors import palettes from a file or accept pasted hex codes. Lospec publishes its palettes in formats including .HEX, .GPL for GIMP and .ASE for Adobe tools, which load straight into most editors.

If your tool wants them typed in, enter them in the index order above. Keeping the PICO-8 numbering means your art matches what the console will show if you ever move it there, and it makes shading ramps easier to find, since the pairs sit at predictable distances.

To use the palette in an app that doesn’t include it, build it yourself. Palette Studio in Pixelize takes a name and a list of hex codes and saves the result next to the built-in palettes. How to make a custom pixel art color palette covers that process, including how to test a palette before committing to it.

PICO-8 vs other retro palettes #

Game Boy palette hex codes and how many colors the NES could display cover those two in detail. The short version: PICO-8 is the friendliest of the small palettes for photo conversion, and the Game Boy is the most stylized.

Frequently asked questions #

What are the PICO-8 palette hex codes? #

#000000, #1D2B53, #7E2553, #008751, #AB5236, #5F574F, #C2C3C7, #FFF1E8, #FF004D, #FFA300, #FFEC27, #00E436, #29ADFF, #83769C, #FF77A8 and #FFCCAA, numbered 0 to 15 in that order.

How many colors can PICO-8 display at once? #

All 16, on a 128 x 128 pixel screen. There’s no per-sprite or per-tile color limit like the NES and ZX Spectrum had, which makes PICO-8 considerably easier to draw for than the hardware it evokes.

Is PICO-8 free? #

No. It costs $14.99 from Lexaloffle and runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and Raspberry Pi. The palette itself is free to use in any tool, since colors aren’t restricted.

Why do pixel artists like the PICO-8 palette? #

It’s small enough to force decisions, and it’s arranged so most hues have a dark and a bright version that shade well together. That combination makes coherent art easy, which is why the palette gets used far outside PICO-8 itself.

Can I use the PICO-8 palette on a photo? #

Yes, and it’s one of the better 16-color palettes for it. Use dithering to smooth gradients, and raise contrast slightly first, since the palette’s dark and bright halves are widely separated. How to turn a photo into pixel art covers the full process.