Palette

All TIC-80 games use a palette of 16 colors drawn from 24-bit colorspace (16 million possible colors). The TIC-80 default palette for all new cartridges is SWEETIE-16.
The game's starting palette can be modified using the Sprite Editor in advanced mode.

Palette_demo

Alter Palette at Runtime

You can alter the palette at runtime using the poke command and poking into the PALETTE area of VRAM. You can replace the whole palette this way, or just a single color.

Swapping Palette Colors

For more temporary swaps (within a palette) PALETTE MAP VRAM is what you need. Let's say we have a sprite that's largely blue but now we'd like a variant that's red (replacing all the blue pixels with red). We don't need a second sprite for this - we can just update the palette map.

PALETTE_MAP = 0x3FF0
blue = 9
red = 2
poke4(PALETTE_MAP * 2 + blue, red) -- swap the colors
-- draw the sprite
poke4(PALETTE_MAP * 2 + blue, blue) -- swap them back

More than 16 Colors

By combining poke and BDR creatively you can potentially display up to 2,176 colors on screen simultaneously (16 colors x 136 scanlines). As always, each scanline is still restricted to 16 colors.

Example

2 or 4-Colors Palette Mode

BPP_demo

This allows to store more sprites and tiles. See the Bits Per Pixel page.

Custom Default Palette

If you don't like the default palette and would like to use a custom palette for all your projects, you can modify the default cart template and therefore its palette, using config default command. Do not forget to save.

TIC-80 Themes

Colors used in the code editor can be configured using the configuration file. One can also change the configuration file palette to customize all editors.

Palettes

SWEETIE-16

Color	Index	Hex
Black	0	1A1C2C
Purple	1	5D275D
Red	2	B13E53
Orange	3	EF7D57
Yellow	4	FFCD75
Light Green	5	A7F070
Green	6	38B764
Dark Green	7	257179
Dark Blue	8	29366F
Blue	9	3B5DC9
Light Blue	10	41A6F6
Cyan	11	73EFF7
White	12	F4F4F4
Light Grey	13	94B0C2
Grey	14	566C86
Dark Grey	15	333C57

Or in a form that can be pasted in the palette editor: 1a1c2c5d275db13e53ef7d57ffcd75a7f07038b76425717929366f3b5dc941a6f673eff7f4f4f494b0c2566c86333c57
The palette editor is accessible in the advanced mode of the sprite editor, with the icon on the right of the palette. The paste icon is on the right of the palette editor.

DB16

Some old cartridges may still use this palette for backwards compatibility.

Other palettes

Find other palettes on Lospec website where you can set the number of colors to be exactly 16 and download the hex file which content can be copy-pasted to the sprite editor.