So the colors in the SNES roms are usually in sets of 8 or 16 at a time. In some unusual cases like when hackers expand an image palette from 8 to 16, the 8 new colors will end up somewhere else— separate from the first half of their palette. This is a guide about how to work with this situation when you import graphics that use split palettes.

Tools Used

Finding Colors

The Palette Viewer in Mesen (Ctrl + 4) will display all the palettes the game is running at the moment. These bytes are in the CG RAM, the temporary place the emulator uses to work with color values.

image.png

I have looked for the entire 16 color palette above in the ROM, but it’s in two places. Doing a “Ctrl + F” to find it in ROM won’t work, because it doesn’t exist all at once. (“Ctrl + F” Find works just like it does in word processors.)

When I look for the first 8 colors, which are 16 bytes, they show up in CG RAM.

image.png

8C 31 FF 7F 5F 4F 9F 26 F5 2A 73 76 2B 55 A6 18

And I can find them in the game itself by Copying and then Pasting the values into a Find window…

image.png

Notice how the Memory Type is PRG ROM, versus the emulator (RAM).

So now the “Find” takes me to the one place they are stored in ROM.

image.png

I’m going to note down where the first 8 colors’ bytes are, so I can get back here easily.

$068760