Celes Amano Sprite sheet

[Timbo]

I'm not terribly familiar with the palette limitations of this game but if I recolored the sprite and used the extended palettes ASM, is there a palette that could approximate these colors?

If that won't work. What would I need to know about expanding the rom to make this possible?

[madsiur]

I'm not terribly familiar with the palette limitations of this game but if I recolored the sprite and used the extended palettes ASM, is there a palette that could approximate these colors?

You can check in FF3usME if one of the first 6 palettes can give a similar result.

If that won't work. What would I need to know about expanding the rom to make this possible?

Palette expansion is a serious headache, because palettes $00-$05 are used for characters but there are more after those use for specific things. You can't just say I'll move the palettes and add one or two at the end, this would require coding inclusions for those palettes. I'm not familiar with the code relevant to overworld and battle paletttes so I can't tell what amount of work this would require.

There's also the SNES limitations, which limit the number of colors on screen and possibly limit the number of palettes used at the same time. I'm not sure if FF6 is close to this limit generally in battle and on map but there must be a good reason why Squaresoft used 6 palettes for 14 characters, I can't believe saving palette space was the only reason.

[Timbo]

Thanks for the explanation Madsiur. I'll look into converting her to palette 3, but I'm not feeling very optimistic about it.

[B-Run]

There are a total of 8 ($00-$07) actor palettes. These are "permanently" loaded during overworld/town. They can be edited in real-time, such as with pallete $06 which is used for special situations and is changed from scene to scene depending on what extra sprites are needed (such as Esper Terra or explosion graphics). $07 works similarly, but is reserved for things like the chocobo and magitek sprites. $00-$05 are the standard PC/NPC palettes and can't be changed without altering a lot of common sprites. Technically you can change them just like $06-$07, but again, there are a lot of sprites that use them so it would mean changing a lot of NPCs if this is for a PC palette change.

Battle is much cleaner, each character gets a unique palette (as far as memory is concerned), by default there is only palettes $00-$06 (a different$06), however with ASM you can expand this to as many as you want. The reason this is the case is that you only get 4 characters in battle, so there is enough VRAM for each character to get its own. Plus they don't "share" palette space due to status effects that temporarily alter the pallete for one person at a time.

The only other key difference between overworld and battle palette usage is the color limit. In the overworld, you get the full 16 colors to work with (15 + 1 transparent). In battle you are restricted to only 12 (11 + 1). But, by expanding the battle palettes the way I mentioned above, you can actually use any 12 colors (11 + 1) for your sprite and have a separate sprite/palette load for battle. This allows a much wider range of color usage in your PC sprites without being tied to Vanilla PC restrictions.

I might have a video on this somewhere... I'm not sure. I will look into it and get back to you if this interests you.

[Timbo]

I haven't considered ROM expansion because all of my modding experience comes from missing final fantasy tactics where ISO expansion is frowned upon. However, since most gamers don't play SNES romhacks on real hardware this is less of a problem.

Will ROM expansion make most of the editing programs unusable?

[madsiur]

Will ROM expansion make most of the editing programs unusable?

They all work well with a 32Mbit expansion. You can even expand with FF3usME!

[Timbo]

That's awesome. How about IPS patches and ASM hacks. Will expansion eff those up at all?

[madsiur]

That's awesome. How about IPS patches and ASM hacks. Will expansion eff those up at all?

Expansion only make your ROM size bigger. It does not affect code. Certain patches and ASM hacks affect offsets beyond regular ROM size so it's better to have made the expansion before using them, otherwise it could result in a non-regular ROM size and certain emulators and real hardware would not play the ROM.

[B-Run]

Check out this tutorial, then watch the first ~20 minutes of this video. If you are interested in keeping Vanilla palettes, but want to work with extended colors... this is the way to do it.

Happy Hacking!