CGA Palette Converter
IBM's Color Graphics Adapter (1981) gave the first IBM PC its colour graphics. Its 320×200 graphics mode could show only four colours at once, and the black, cyan, magenta and white set became the look of early PC games. This tool maps your image to exactly those four colours (palette 1 at high intensity) at 320 pixels across, with dithering to suggest the shades in between.
- Processed locally
- No upload, no wait
- No sign-up
- No watermark
Drop images here
or choose files · paste with Ctrl/⌘ V
JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, AVIF, GIF, TIFF, SVG, RAW, PSD, JXL, BMP, ICO and more
How to use CGA Palette
- 1
Drop your images, choose files, or paste from the clipboard.
- 2
Adjust the options. The preview updates as you change them.
- 3
Click Apply. Files are processed on your device.
- 4
Download each result or everything as a ZIP.
Why use Aback Images for cga palette
Real hardware palettes
Colours from the NES, Game Boy, PICO-8, Commodore 64, IBM CGA and EGA, classic Mac OS and 1 and 2-bit greys, rather than a palette guessed from your image.
Chunky pixels on demand
Set how many pixels across the picture should be, from full resolution down to a few dozen.
Dithering
Optional dithering mixes palette colours to suggest shades a small palette lacks.
Processed on your device
Your images are decoded, edited and encoded inside this browser tab by Web Workers. Nothing is uploaded to a server.
About CGA Palette
Limitations
- Each pixel is mapped to the nearest colour in the palette. Real hardware also limited how many colours could share a tile or a scanline; those rules are not applied, so photos keep more colour variety than the original machine could show.
Related tools
Turn photos into 8-bit style art: chunky pixels mapped onto real NES, Game Boy, PICO-8, C64, CGA or EGA palettes, with optional dithering.
Enlarge sprites and pixel art by whole-number factors with crisp nearest-neighbour pixels or Scale2x smoothing. GIFs stay animated.
Downsample to a pixel grid with a limited palette for retro 8-bit art.
Quantize to a palette of 2 to 256 colours with optional dithering.
20 film and colour looks: vintage, noir, Kodachrome, lomo, polaroid, thermal, pop art and more.
Turn photos grayscale with accurate luminance weighting.
Gaussian or motion blur with adjustable strength.
Unsharp-mask sharpening to bring back detail in soft photos.
Frequently asked questions
Why did CGA games look so garish?
In 320×200 mode the adapter offered just two fixed four-colour sets, so artists chose between cyan, magenta and white or green, red and brown, always with a background colour (usually black). Dithering patterns were the only way to fake other shades.
Are my images uploaded anywhere?
No. Processing happens inside your browser with WebAssembly and Web Workers. The site only downloads the app code and codecs; your files never leave your device. You can confirm this with the live upload counter on the tool, or in your browser's network panel.
Can I process many files at once?
Yes. Drop a whole selection or folder. Files are processed in parallel on several worker threads, each result can be downloaded on its own, and everything can be saved as one ZIP.
Is it free? Is there a file limit or watermark?
It is free with no account, no watermark and no daily limit. The only limit is your device's memory: very large images (over roughly 100 megapixels) may be refused to keep the tab from crashing.