Retro Palette quantizes any picture down to the exact colours a Game Boy, an NES or a Commodore 64 could actually put on screen — including the on-screen colour budgets the real hardware had to live within — then dithers it the way cartridge artists did. Every step runs on your phone. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, nothing is tracked.
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No layers, no brushes, no export settings you have to learn. The interesting decisions — which colours the hardware could show together, how to spread the error, how big a pixel should be — are the app's job, not yours.
Choose any photo from your gallery. Retro Palette asks for photo access only at the moment you pick, and it reads exactly the one image you selected.
Game Boy, NES or C64 for free; PICO-8, ZX Spectrum, CGA and Virtual Boy with the Pro unlock. Pixel size runs from Chunky · 96px through Classic · 160px and Fine · 256px, or off entirely if you want full resolution.
Perceptual (redmean) colour matching, a saturation and contrast pre-boost, a per-image sub-palette chosen within the hardware's on-screen limit, ordered Bayer dithering and a despeckle pass — all computed locally, in a second or two.
The result goes straight into your photo library as a normal PNG. No watermark, no export queue, no “share to unlock”.
The NES had a 64-entry master table but could only hold about 13 background colours on screen at once. Retro Palette honours that: it picks the best sub-palette for your image, the way a cartridge artist would have. That constraint is what makes the output look period-correct instead of merely posterised.
Ordered 4×4 Bayer dithering is the default — the regular crosshatch texture you remember from 8- and 16-bit art. It holds up far better on photographs than plain error diffusion, which turns skin and sky into noise.
There is no backend to be down and no API key to expire. The conversion engine is plain local computation, so the app works identically on a plane, in a basement, or on a phone that has never been online.
These are the commonly accepted canonical values for each machine — Pepto's measured VIC-II table for the C64, the NesDev table for the 2C02, the DMG-01's four-shade green ramp. They are pinned by golden-file tests, so the same image and the same settings always produce the same output.
Retro Palette collects no personal data, because it has nowhere to put it. There is no backend, no account system and no analytics SDK in the app. This is not a policy promise bolted on afterwards — it is what the app is architecturally capable of.
If you buy the Pro unlock, the purchase is handled by Apple's App Store or Google Play, and the receipt is validated through RevenueCat, which tells the app whether you own it. That exchange carries an anonymous purchase identifier — not your name, not your email, not your photos. Everything else in the app is offline.
The free tier is a real app, not a trial: three palettes, every conversion feature, unwatermarked exports, no time limit. Pro is a single non-consumable purchase — there is no subscription, and nothing expires.
Purchases are processed by Apple or Google, and the local price is shown inside the app before you confirm. Refunds are handled by the store you bought from — see the terms of use.
No. Palette matching, dithering, scaling and export all run on your device. There is no server to upload to — the app ships without any image-handling network code at all.
No. There is no sign-in, no profile and no user database. Open it and convert something.
The four Pro palettes — PICO-8, ZX Spectrum, CGA and Virtual Boy — and a higher export cap, 4096px instead of 1024px on the long side. One purchase, no subscription.
Sign in to the same App Store or Google Play account and tap Restore purchases on the Pro screen. The entitlement lives with your store account, not with a Retro Palette account — which is why there is nothing to lose access to.
No, and deliberately so. Retro Palette handles no game data of any kind. A palette here is a list of colour values measured from the original display hardware, applied to photographs you already own.
Because the constraint is different. The NES conversion first chooses the 13 colours it is allowed to show at once, so it commits to a mood; the C64's 16 colours are all available simultaneously. Faithfully reproducing that difference is most of the app.
iPhone and iPad on iOS 15 or later, and Android phones and tablets on Android 10 or later.
We build software end to end — web, mobile, backend and the boring production parts in between. Retro Palette is one of our own products, and the same people who wrote it answer the support mail.