The default MEGA65 color palette consists of the 16 colors of the Commodore 64 palette followed by 16 rainbow-themed colors.

This demo program by retroCombs prints the colors and their names on a MEGA65:

Open

Using colours from BASIC 65

To change which palette entry is used for printing, use the COLOR command:

To change which palette entry is used for bitmap graphics, use the PEN command:

In the MEGA65’s regular color mode, the color in each palette entry can be changed to any of 4,096 colors, with 16 possible settings for red, green, and blue. To change the color for a palette entry:

To restore the default colors:

Table of Colour RGB Values

The following table lists the color index, MEGA65 RGB values, and the approximate web hex code for each color. The RGB values are the arguments for the PALETTE command to reproduce the color on the MEGA65.

The hex codes for the C64 colors (from the C64 Wiki) represent how a C64 (or the MEGA64 in C64 mode) reproduces the colors. These do not match the MEGA65 RGB values in all cases. When reproducing the colors on a web page or in a modern graphics program, you may prefer the RGB values over the hex code to reproduce the MEGA65 display instead of the C64.

PETSCII Codes for selecting colours

In the Appendix, in a section called “PETSCII Codes and CHR$”, there is a table listing all the PETSCII codes. Some of these relate to selecting colours. For convenience, here’s a filtered table containing only the PETSCII codes relating to selecting colours: