I've noticed that screenshots of the same things in different emulators often have slightly different colors. In particular, Kawaks, Nebula, Final Burn Alpha, and MAME all give different color values for CPS games, and the same goes for Kawaks, Nebula, and MAME with Neo-Geo games. So does anyone happen to know which emulator is the most accurate color-wise for those two systems?

This may not answer your question of which is accurate, but why not take the palette from each emulator and use that for giving different palettes to your character (if it is a character), so instead not knowing which is accurate, you'll be accurate no matter what palette you use.

Just a thought...

(if it's not a character, ignore me then)

I won't worry about the colors. Go get the colors after you ripped all the sprites , from banners, logos, pictures, etc :

Kiki: Winane specializes in stages he needs an accurate rip so it doesnt waste his time where a character doesnt matter too much.

I know for a fact that kawaks gives the correct colors for cps2 characters, I imagine the same for the backgrounds.

[quote author=Messatsu13 link=board=6;threadid=838;start=0#msg8833 date=1043861423]I know for a fact that kawaks gives the correct colors for cps2 characters, I imagine the same for the backgrounds.[/quote]

That depends a WHOLE lot on how you define "correct". Not to mention that you can set Kawaks to various brightness settings. So, which one of them is correct?

Anyhow, I recall having this discussion with some emulator developers when the CPS-2 encryption was first broken, and at least MAME operates under the rule that what's absolute red, green and blue on the board (which can be seen in the game's RGB test) should be absolute red, green and blue when emulated (which in a PC's case would be 255 - 0 - 0, 0 - 255 - 0 and 0 - 0 - 255) as well, and I find that that's a pretty fair assumption. So they've adjusted their driver until the values match.

I find that you should go with what you think looks best in this case, as no one's gonna' look at your creations and go: "haha, I can see that that color's off, you little bastard!" 'cause the differences are so minute that it's not really noticeable unless you over the rips with a magnifyer or whatever.

oh he wants stages , sorry never knew . .. .

Well, I never said I'll never make any characters. Until right now, that is.

Anyway, the question was more one of curiosity than anything else. I'm pretty much stuck with Nebula for ripping anything unless Kawaks gets a sprite offset feature, or unless someone fixes SFMAME's Neo-Geo sprite offset stuff.
*looks at JJWE with puppy-dog eyes, with tears welling up caused by Nebula's messed-up Neo-Geo frame advance*

So, I would have guessed that CPS (and Neo-Geo) games store color info in basically the same format as Mugen (i.e. 8-bit, with palettes with RGB values from 0-255), in which case you could simply find those stored values in the ROMs to check their accuracy. But is that not the case?

Messatsu13, just out of curiosity, where did you learn about Kawaks' color accuracy?
And in Kawaks, would the "brighter" option actually be more accurate than the "normal" brightness option?

It is more of an assumed truth on my part. With the brightness default, I have color values ranging from 0-240 in incriments of 16. I don't remember when playing any cps game on the arcades them having an absolute white so I am thinking that 240 is the correct max? Like JJWE said no one is going to yell at you for semi incorrect values when they cannot tell the difference.