mode 7 background

does that mean i cannot change the color palette of the mode 7 bottom half?

It means its going to take a little more effort than changing a color in mspaint. If the disassembly doesn't show it then it will take some digging into to figure out the code, requiring a good working knowledge of the assembly code. There are a number of good sites on the subject, after that you will want to start looking over the code in the disassembly for where the color selection might logically take place (like during take off), then start looking it over byte by byte with your assembly guide and translate it, looking for a value that might be that background color. It will be tedius and likely hard to follow, but you will learn a lot and it will feel good to find it.

Edrin is right. If the palette is identified in a ROM map, you could perform a search with the offset of the palette in the mode 7 bank (EE I think).

i have used the hex editor to change the music pointer (dark to searching for friends and removing the veldt music should i return to the world of balance), but is there a specific way to find the EE bank?

EE will be anything from 2E0000 to 2EFFFF on your editor. If your rom is headered, 2E0200 to 2F01FF.

While spending 5 minutes to look for your stuff ON THE JOB, I found this:

Code:

EE/8781:    BF00ECD2    LDA $D2EC00,X  (Overworld map and sky palettes)

I don't have time to look further but with what I saw in bank EE the sky color is also a question of gradients applied to the color, which make some portions of the sky darker. You might have to disable them.