Classroom Glossary Public page

Lab Pack 3: NES Palette Modification (Week 3)

Read the open-source NES core's PPU palette HDL, change two of the sixty-four palette entries to colors of your choice, synthesise, run, observe the change on HDMI (or in the browser core).


What you ship

  • A diff showing the two palette entries you changed.
  • A before-and-after screenshot pair from the same ROM showing the visible difference.
  • A short README explaining which colors you picked and why.
  • A Toolchain Diary entry for whichever HDL synthesiser you used.

Tools you use

  • The community NES core source mirrored in your student repo under cores/nes/.
  • Workbench: Bitplane decomposer for cross-checking pixel-to-palette mapping.
  • SPK-101 classroom: NES sprite inspector.

Success criteria

  • The two palette entries are visibly changed in a running ROM.
  • Your README names the palette index, the original RGB, and the new RGB.
  • You can explain where in the HDL the palette RAM lives.

Time budget

Plan for two ninety-minute lab sessions plus two hours of independent build-out. Slower students should plan for one extra session.

Submission

Push to your student repo under con-101/labs/lab-3/. Include source, a one-paragraph README, and a screenshot or short clip of the artefact running.