GBA Palette Editing Tutorial Request

[Chalk]

Hello, I was wondering if anyone could offer documentation on the simplest way to edit the palettes of GBA games? Specifically how people are able to make Color Restoration hacks, like these ones:

Super Mario Advance - SNES Color Restoration (Game Boy Advance) Romhack - RomHack Plaza

Super Mario Advance, like many Game Boy Advance games, features bright and washed out colors in order to compensate for the unlit screen of the console’s

romhackplaza.org

Superstar Saga Color Improvement (Game Boy Advance) Romhack - RomHack Plaza

Like most games for the Game Boy Advance, Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga has a color palette which is overbright and washed out in order to be visible on

romhackplaza.org

Where they can replace the washed out palettes of GBA games with more vivid, darker ones.

Specifically, I want to do this for Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga. I know I just linked to a palette hack of it, but there are some issues with that mod I'd like to take a look at myself.
It would also be nice to know how to do this for other games. I've tried looking into it myself but there are so many tools to choose from and it's hard to know what the most intuitive method is.

Thank you for any information!

 

[Wolfric]

Hello, I was wondering if anyone could offer documentation on the simplest way to edit the palettes of GBA games? Specifically how people are able to make Color Restoration hacks, like these ones:

Super Mario Advance - SNES Color Restoration (Game Boy Advance) Romhack - RomHack Plaza

Super Mario Advance, like many Game Boy Advance games, features bright and washed out colors in order to compensate for the unlit screen of the console’s

romhackplaza.org

Superstar Saga Color Improvement (Game Boy Advance) Romhack - RomHack Plaza

Like most games for the Game Boy Advance, Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga has a color palette which is overbright and washed out in order to be visible on

romhackplaza.org

Where they can replace the washed out palettes of GBA games with more vivid, darker ones.

Specifically, I want to do this for Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga. I know I just linked to a palette hack of it, but there are some issues with that mod I'd like to take a look at myself.
It would also be nice to know how to do this for other games. I've tried looking into it myself but there are so many tools to choose from and it's hard to know what the most intuitive method is.

Thank you for any information!

Well, I'd use Mesen to get the palettes. Click Debug > Sprite Viewer


There, select Sprite Map under Source:


Then click on a sprite tile, you'll see its palette to the right:


Now that you know the palette, you need to extract the hex.


Click Debug > TileViewer



Find the character sprite whose palette you want. You can click on the presets on the top right until you find the character tiles. Once you do, click the palette list until you find the palette that matches:

 

[Wolfric]

Now, hover over the colors and you'll get their respective bytes:


For the first color, it's the little endian 4D 45. This is usually stored in with bytes in opposite order, so... 45 4D.

Get the rest of the numbers and you'll end up with... (Once inverting their 2 bytes)
45 4D 2C 6A D1 7E 56 7F FF 7F 7B 4B F7 3A 94 15 17 26 DD 3A 7F 57 81 6D BB 01 13 00 21 04

Now try finding these hex values in HxD. Sometimes, the first and/or last colors are not stored with the palette. So if you can't find it, try removing 2 bytes from the left, then 2 bytes from the right etc.

It's similar for the stage palettes. Just use the tools above.

As for updating colors, I made my own tool to help ME with it. Maybe it'd help you:

TPL Palette Converter

It helped me create the palette file to use with tlp/Tile Molester and quick conversion between RRGGBB to how the games I've worked with store them.