Palette cycling is an interesting technique borne out of limitations of old graphic cards. Today, any pixel can have any color it wants. In the 1970s and 1980s, you were limited to just a few fixed colors: as few as 2 for monochrome displays, or 4, or 8, or – if you were lucky – 16. Some of those fixed palettes, like CGA’s, became iconic:

But there was an interesting hybrid period in between then and now where you still were only allowed 4 or 8 or 16 or 256 color choices in total, but you could assign any of these at will from a much bigger palette.

So, as an example, each one of these three is made out of 16 colors, but each one is 16 different colors:

Moving pixels was slow. But palette swaps were so fast and easy, that it led to a technique known as palette cycling. This is probably the best-known example, from an Atari ST program called NEOchrome.

Despite so much apparent movement, no pixels are changing location, as that’d be prohibitively slow in 1985. Only the palette is changing. If you watch the same animation with the UI visible, you can clearly see which colors are “static,” and which are moving around:

But this was 1985, so why I am mentioning it 40 years later?

I like looking at old computers for a few reasons. Some of these seeminly-ancient techniques are inspiring and remind me that the limitations are often in the eye of the beholder. Seeing someone really good pushing a platform to its limits is just a good thing to load into your neurons – this could be you next time! And, believe it or not, some tips and tricks can still be relevant.

For example, this is a 9-minute video by Steffest from just earlier this year that walks through a modern attempt to make a palette cycling animation, including starting on an iPad:

The end result goes much harder than I expected. It was interesting to see again the technique of dithering to simulate transparency (we’ve seen it before, but this one is more advanced). But what particularly stood out to me here was the artist making his own little tools to aid in the creative process; I’ve always loved the notion that a computer is really just meant to be an accelerant, making it easy for you to avoid drudgery.