Presumably whatever palette-entry-to-RGB encoding Nintendo's own emulators (e.g. NES VC, NES Online, the NES classic) use, should be considered at least somewhat "canonical", no?
And I don't mean because Nintendo has any special "auteur" control over what NES games "should" look like (they never expressed such control, since they never shipped a NES with a screen!)
Rather, I mean that the palette maps Nintendo uses in their emulators are probably the same maps Nintendo used, in the other direction, to do the original conversion of the RGB palettes of their PC art-assets, into NES palettes to wire into the hardware. I.e., if Mario's red coveralls in Donkey Kong (a Famicom launch title, so likely ported during hardware development) renders as #800000 on Nintendo's emulators, that's probably the same RGB color that was in the PCX file's palette that informed the tuning of the NTSC rasterizer's output for that particular palette entry.
Nintendo's RGB palettes have typically been what many would call "crap". Probably the NES Classic got closest. Wii VC was way too dark. None of them too horribly accurate.
I don't think they used PCX along the way at all. At one point, they'd digitize graphics by using LEDs to scan filled-in graph paper, one tile at a time. I think the closest Nintendo ever got to actually having an official RGB palette for the NES in the old days was the RGB PPU palette (which was very, very different from the colors output by the composite PPU).
The NES PPU is fairly well understood, and palettes can actually be calculated based on that (as opposed to some of the user-created palettes done with visual analysis). All of Nintendo's RGB palettes (AFAIK) are known and dumped.
Presumably whatever palette-entry-to-RGB encoding Nintendo's own emulators (e.g. NES VC, NES Online, the NES classic) use, should be considered at least somewhat "canonical", no?
And I don't mean because Nintendo has any special "auteur" control over what NES games "should" look like (they never expressed such control, since they never shipped a NES with a screen!)
Rather, I mean that the palette maps Nintendo uses in their emulators are probably the same maps Nintendo used, in the other direction, to do the original conversion of the RGB palettes of their PC art-assets, into NES palettes to wire into the hardware. I.e., if Mario's red coveralls in Donkey Kong (a Famicom launch title, so likely ported during hardware development) renders as #800000 on Nintendo's emulators, that's probably the same RGB color that was in the PCX file's palette that informed the tuning of the NTSC rasterizer's output for that particular palette entry.