An Ode to #AA5500

Posted on August 12, 2026

Believe it or not, this is another blog post about the standard EGA palette (which was actually created earlier for the CGA standard, but let's keep it simple). Specifically, this is a post about color 6, commonly known as BROWN.

#000000 #0000AA #00AA00 #00AAAA #AA0000 #AA00AA #AA5500 #AAAAAA
#555555 #5555FF #55FF55 #55FFFF #FF5555 #FF55FF #FFFF55 #FFFFFF

If we compare the hexadecimal RGB values of the colors in the top row, we can see that they all feature permutations of 00s and AAs. Except for color 6 (if we start counting at 0), which sneaks in a 55 where an AA should be. Why is that?

As much as the palette choices were a product of technical constraints and matter-of-fact engineering, someone must have stopped for a moment and actually looked at the colors. With its regular RGB values, color 6 would look like this:

#AAAA00 - more like #EEEEWW!

This DARK YELLOW was rightly recognized as an assault on the eyes, so a more pleasing alternative was devised. That is how we got BROWN. This change was not a matter of simply flipping an internal switch, but required special circuitry in the monitors of the time, so it wasn't a decision made lightly.

To show you what could have been, but luckily wasn't, here is an example of what the Border Village from Commander Keen 4: Secret of the Oracle would look like with DARK YELLOW instead of BROWN:

A double screenshot from Commander Keen 4. The version on the left shows the game in its regular EGA colors. The version on the right shows the game with the brown color replaced by the dark yellow that EGA would have used without the manual color correction. The right version looks rather hideous.
Sick!

I think that speaks for itself. Of course, if EGA had been shipped with DARK YELLOW, artists would have adapted their work accordingly and not used it as a substitute for BROWN. But let's be glad that wasn't necessary and that at least one of the 16 colors was deliberately chosen for aesthetic reasons.