Game Boy

Spec	Value
Resolution	160×144
Total colors	4 shades
Simultaneous	4
Constraint	Global monochrome palette
Display	STN LCD (green-tinted)
Year	1989
Maker	Nintendo

Color palette

The original Game Boy (DMG-01) has no color — just 4 shades rendered on a green-tinted STN LCD. The entire screen shares a single palette register.

Game Boy DMG (BGB emulator palette)

The Game Boy Pocket improved the LCD to a greyscale display:

Game Boy Pocket

The key constraint: 4 shades, that’s it

With only 4 brightness levels, every artistic decision comes down to contrast management. There’s no color to fall back on — readability depends entirely on how well the 4 shades are distributed.

This extreme limitation is what makes Game Boy-style pixel art so distinctive. Dithering patterns become a critical tool: Floyd-Steinberg creates smooth gradients, while ordered dithering (Bayer) produces the clean, patterned look many Game Boy games used.

Interactive demo

SystemDitheringUpload image

Original

Game Boy (DMG)

Code example


import { process } from 'bitmapped';
import { getPreset } from 'bitmapped/presets';
 
const gb = getPreset('gameboy-dmg')!;
 
const result = process(imageData, {
  blockSize: 4,
  palette: gb.palette!,
  dithering: 'bayer',
  ditherStrength: 0.8,
  distanceAlgorithm: 'redmean',
});

Try Bayer dithering at strength 0.6–0.8 for the most authentic Game Boy look. Floyd-Steinberg works too but produces a softer result than what you’d typically see in actual Game Boy games, which used hand-placed dithering patterns.

Presets

bitmapped includes three Game Boy presets:

gameboy-dmg — Original DMG green LCD palette
gameboy-pocket — Game Boy Pocket greyscale palette
gameboy-color — Game Boy Color with 15-bit RGB (32,768 colors), 8 background palettes of 4 colors with per-tile selection

Hardware notes

The Game Boy’s LCD is a 160×144 pixel STN (super-twisted nematic) display with notoriously slow response time, producing visible ghosting on moving sprites. The green tint comes from the LCD technology itself — the backlight (actually a reflective layer) produces a green-shifted image.

The PPU supports two tile maps, each with its own palette register that maps the 2-bit pixel values (0–3) to one of 4 shade levels. In practice, games almost always use the same mapping for the entire screen.

The Game Boy Color upgraded to a TFT display with 15-bit RGB color (5 bits per channel). Each 8×8 tile independently selects from 8 background palettes of 4 colors each — similar in concept to the SNES but at a smaller scale.