Making some Blues into Purples

image.png

This example will show the steps taken to change half of the colors of the above map sprite.

The 4 character palettes in this game begin at $068000. I found this out by using Mesen, and the Tile Viewer and Palette Viewer Debug tools.

Then I right clicked on the palette colors, and chose “View in Memory Viewer”.

image.png

So this is the first of 4 character map palettes in the FF4 rom. I’m going to log the 8 colors’ byte data below: it’s 2 bytes for a color in the SNES rom, so an 8 color palette (3bpp) is only 16 bytes.

00 00  00 00  5D 22  96 01  7F 01  4C 7E  74 7F  8C 69

image.png

Here’s how I want the new sprite to look, in game. I’ve edited this image (PNG file) in Usenti, but many other programs will work, too.

Here’s “map Edge (PURPLE, by xJ4cks)” and it will still use the orange and 3 blues unless I change the latter half of the palette’s bytes to create gold and 3 purples. In this Edge PURPLE palette map sprite, only half of the original colors are changed (skin colors, outline, and transparency all stay the same); so, different numbers for colors #5 - #8).

00 00  00 00  5D 22  96 01  FF 2B  8C 69  D7 7A  EB 44

Now that I know what bytes I’m going to be working with, I can move ahead to the other part, which is importing a PNG file of this sprite with some edits (so it looks better with the new colors).

ff6tools + Mesen are Both Used

The process is 2 steps. First I import a changed sprite using ff6tools and save it, and then I change those 8 bytes in rom at the end of the palette, so the map sprite will look exactly like I want.

To connect all this together, the RGB values of the 8th palette color shown in Usenti above (R=11, G=7, B=17) become the value EB 44 when translated for the SNES rom. (Here’s the converter that makes this easy: SNES Color Calculator Sheet )

Worksheet of Changes to Make to the Rom

Original palette 00

color 5 = 31,11,0

color 6 = 12,18,31

color 7 = 20,27,31

color 8 = 12,12,26

Changed palette 00

color 5 = 31,31,10

color 6 = 12,12,26

color 7 = 23,22,30

color 8 = 11,7,17

00 00 00 00 5D 22 96 01 7F 01 4C 7E 74 7F 8C 69

Needs to get replaced with