Patch: allowing use of "reserved" palette colors for player characters

Here's some progress I'm making.



This is a picture of the kind of glitch I was experiencing, which led me to look at the menu screens I'm looking at, and try to put some "finishing touches" on things. It's turned into a bigger project than that, obviously.

Mog's and Umaro's sprites were wrong on several screens, because their palette was partially overwritten by the hand cursor (yes, just like in battle). This was sort of dumb, because there was free space for at least one more palette on each of these screens. Then again, there was also no disadvantage to it, given that they weren't going to use beyond the first 12 colors anyway, for other reasons.

The sepia/bronze palette used on the save screen was also glitched with expanded-color characters. In a similar way, for similar reasons.

Well, here's the progress I've made. The party-change screen (seen above with Mog) is still not fixed. But will be.

Here is the save screen.



Shadow is not glitched here. He is using palette 6, and showing up "correctly", albeit with a weird palette not designed for human characters.

Black Celes is also using a previously-unused palette: number 7. In the unaltered game, palettes 6 and 7 would show up with random colors on the save screen. Now, not only do the expanded colors of palettes 0-5 all show up correctly on the save screen, but so do palettes 6 & 7.

This is not an unaltered palette 7. It uses the exact same set of colors as before, but they have been switched around, so it will look better when it's assigned to a PC. I also played with the chocobo and magitek sprites to compensate for that (they are the only sprites that originally used it) and so they look the same as before. Just editing the sprites (shuffling the color indices) worked for the world map, but in order to get it to work in battle too, I also had to alter the way the mtek graphics are loaded for battle. The sprite now caches itself in RAM the same way PCs do. That allows me to do the same expanded palette thing I do for PCs. So, it looks right in battle too, now.



This is the "secretly impressive" screen shot. The impressive part isn't the PCs using expanded colors (which you've seen before), but the part the shows no sign of being altered: the mtek armor. It's using expanded colors like the PCs, except that its expanded colors are the same colors, moved to different indices in the palette. This unreasonably was hard to do compared with the payoff. But it's done.

So I've done the save screen, and I'll do the party-select and shop screens too. You might remember me talking about tradeoffs, like the cursors being simplified or face portraits removed. I won't have to do this, because I've gotten clever. All eight palettes can be enabled without any disadvantages, and can all show up on the same screen, AND there can be additional elements like cursors and portraits that have their own sets of colors too.

"How is this possible? Isn't the palette space on the SNES very limited, and isn't that the reason for this patch in the first place?"

Yes, it is. But there are tricks to get around it, including one called HDMA. It turns out, the SNES can write to video memory during short breaks between TV scan lines (V-Blank). Thus it can alter itself as the picture is progressively drawn on the screen, starting at the top and moving down. This is already used in the vanilla game, to make the gradient effect without wasting tons of palette indices on it.

I'm using this to change the palettes mid-way through drawing the screen.

The save screens you're looking at actually have 12 different palettes visible at a time, per screen. Each character can have his own, and they can all (in principle) be different. There are different versions of the sepia/bronze palette for each original palette, unlike in the original game. My version looks better than the vanilla game.

They could also be shown in full color if I wanted. And they will be on the shop and party screens.

There are limits to how much data you can transfer over time as the picture is drawn down the screen, within a frame. You can't change every palette all at once on a single scan line. You have to work it out carefully. So, this technique works because these screens are very ordered, with all sprites holding still in a predictable place.

In other words, don't ask me to pull something like this off in the battle or town screens.

Well, OK. I hope someone enjoys making full use of the full set of palettes once this is done.

4 magitek armors CAN be loaded in battle and although all the characters themselves appear fine, there is an extra weird glitchy magitek armor in the battle, some formations using too many different palettes load the same glitch

Thanks. I might look into this eventually, but not right away. My version should glitch the same way as the original, but not be any worse.

Oh, and BTW, the world-map PC palettes (the ones set by events) are in $1f70. That would be RAM. In the .srm file, it's the corresponding place, which is +970 offset from the beginning of the save slot. They're "doubled". It's their palette number (as seen in ff3usME) times two. So there's that information, if anyone else wants it.