colour palette
colour palette
(graphics, hardware)The number of entries (logical colours) in the palette is thetotal number of colours which can appear on screensimultaneously. The width of each entry determines the numberof colours which the palette can be set to produce.
A common example would be a palette of 256 colours(i.e. addressed by eight-bit pixel values) where each colourcan be chosen from a total of 16.7 million colours (i.e. eightbits output for each of red, green and blue).
Changes to the palette affect the whole screen at once and canbe used to produce special effects which would be much slowerto produce by updating pixels.