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

[B-Run]

This is seriously fantastic. I await the finished product. You should totally call this patch PaletteJack, which I was going to use if I ever got around to a 16-color patch. My solitary contribution. I was skeptical about using palettes 6-7 because I didn't like the idea of a tradeoff because I'm more than happy using the existing palette space, but if you removed even that tradeoff, this is just amazing-good.

Will this add any additional lag in any additional places? I imagine you are recoloring the mtek armors in the actual ROM so that it doesn't cause additional slowdown. And for the save menu, since you are altering palettes in the time it takes to write the screen that probably isn't causing any noticeable slowdown. But anything else? Is there ANY drawback to ANYTHING you are doing? Cause you are seriously kicking Square's butt right now in coding.

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 had actually heard of this and thought of using it a while ago, but since it had to do with the SNES graphical processing, I wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot-poll (which would make hacking a lot harder). I am seriously impressed.