Gameboy Color DX Hacks (+GBC to GBA enhancement hacks)

[marc_max]

Donkey Kong (GB) in full color!?

Yes ^_^
I started working on it a few days ago and there has been some positive progress already. Do not expect it anytime soon, but 2023 *might* be feasible.


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Oh, by the way, DK94 isn't the only colorization coming.

Mega Man: Wily's Revenge from SpecialAgentApe
Kirby's Dream Land 2 from kkzero

And there are more that haven't made public yet, so stay tuned, looks like 2023 is gonna become a great year for colorizations!

[Brutapode89]

Yes ^_^
I started working on it a few days ago and there has been some positive progress already. Do not expect it anytime soon, but 2023 *might* be feasible.


---


Oh, by the way, DK94 isn't the only colorization coming.

Mega Man: Wily's Revenge from SpecialAgentApe
Kirby's Dream Land 2 from kkzero

And there are more that haven't made public yet, so stay tuned, looks like 2023 is gonna become a great year for colorizations!

Awesome for other colorizations!

But have you already taken a break before that? Because after Mega Man V, I think you was tired.

[Supergamerguy]

Yes ^_^
I started working on it a few days ago and there has been some positive progress already. Do not expect it anytime soon, but 2023 *might* be feasible.


---


Oh, by the way, DK94 isn't the only colorization coming.

Mega Man: Wily's Revenge from SpecialAgentApe
Kirby's Dream Land 2 from kkzero

And there are more that haven't made public yet, so stay tuned, looks like 2023 is gonna become a great year for colorizations!

We're too spoiled by you all in the hacking community

[radimerry]

We're incredibly fortunate that *multiple* hackers now have the confidence + ability to take on such hard colorizing beasts! (not counting all these new obscure retro translations a few of us have quietly wanted)


You're able to set the bar so high now, I actually kinda gave up on (bugfix) hacking altogether.


Thank you for using your skills in creating these gorgeous, memorable hacks.

[Brutapode89]

By the way, marc_max. It's about four first levels in Donkey Kong (GB), will be colors like in the Arcade version?

Example: Black back area, pink girders, turquoise ladders, etc...

[2mono7]

I have been really wanting to play TMNT II: back from the sewers in color because I think it would look very good with the beautiful sprite work that the game has. Does anyone know if this is already out or is in development? Any response would be greatly appreciated.

[Zer0454]

This is odd. Under injection methods, I have the two Retroarch choices and then Old GB Virtual Console and New GB Virtual Console. Nothing about linking or Alt. You're using New Super Ultimate right? Do you know which version?

Okay so it looks like I'm using an older verion, Beta 26. I have no idea what changed between then and the latest version to cause it to not work. I really wish I could be of more help, but I just don't get it.

Hey so, I know I'm real late to this, but are you sure your game is the 2.0 version? You can tell by the options menu, if Luigi is there its 2.0.

[Shadowman621]

I just checked and I guess I had an older version. I don't know why I thought it was the latest version. I am sorry for the confusion!

[amaturehr]

A cool new GB Colorization has popped up out of no where:

Revenge Of The Gator (Gold) : https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/7480/

    

[Supergamerguy]

A cool new GB Colorization has popped up out of no where:

Revenge Of The Gator (Gold) : https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/7480/

    

Thank you for letting me know this existed! It was unfortunately buried on the RHDN homepage pretty quickly by other hacks, so I didn't ever see it pop up.

The list has been updated accordingly!

[EvilJagaGenius]

I know the Wario Land DX hack is nice, but it isn't the best colorization.  I found this disasm for Wario Land if korxo or any other intrepid hacker would like to take another stab at it: https://github.com/Kak2X/wl

Also, I was looking at the gbdev wiki trying to figure out how colorization works: https://gbdev.gg8.se/wiki/articles/Video_Display#VRAM_Background_Maps
From reading, it seems like the basics would be:
- Set the ROM header to be a GBC game
- Write palettes to palette RAM
- Find where the game writes to the sprite attribute and BG map attribute tables
- Set the palettes in the attribute tables
Can any of the more experienced color hackers confirm or deny if that's a good line of thinking?

[Specialagentape]

That's the gist of it, but you'll also find you need to custom code screen effects (fadeouts, fadeins, palette cycling), as GBC lacks the same style of screen fade that the DMG has. Other things to keep in mind are enabling GBC doublespeed to not slow down the game to a crawl when writing palettes, and then dealing with the side effects of that (broken tile writes outside of VBlank/HBlank). There are various methods to accomplish this, but they require a bit of experimentation for sure and a lot of the nitty-gritty stuff definitely comes down to what kind of game you're messing with.

In other news, my Wily's Revenge colorization is now in the playtesting phase and should be releasing quite soon, so please look forward to it. 

EDIT: And it's out! Note that I mainly tested it in BGB and on 3DS Virtual Console so please let me know if there are emulator compatibility issues or errors. Likely once I get a few bug reports I'll do them all in one fell swoop rather than giving the mods a headache with a billion tiny revisions.

EDIT2: There is a known bug with the initial patch in VisualBoyAdvance when entering Wily 1. I have added a second patch as a hotfix for use with that emulator and a v1.01 with a proper fix will be on the way soon; only use the VBA patch if you are using a fork of VBA.

For technical details: VBA ignores the upper bit when writing to FF69 and FF6B and this is not console accurate behavior--the console should write the entire byte and only ignores the upper bit when rendering. This problem seems to extend to all versions of VisualBoyAdvance that I tried. The crash is due to a comparison with this bit and since VBA never writes it correctly, it repeatedly tries to make the values match to no avail. The fix will be simple (resetting upper bit of every other byte in my bitwise palette fades) but this is something future colorizers should keep in mind.

[Supergamerguy]

The list has been updated! Thank you, Specialagentape, for gifting us Mega Man fans with such a great project!

[Specialagentape]

^ No problem! I hope you'll enjoy it
I hope to do 2 at some point as well.

Version 1.01 is awaiting mod approval and should fix the error with VBA, thanks to the person who made me aware of the bug. It also fixes one incorrect face assignment for Ice Man.

[amaturehr]

Man, @Specialagentape, talk about under promise over deliver!  When you said "soon" I thought weeks, but BAM drops it the same day.  Thank you so much, this really does make my year!  I love the mega man GB games so much.

[amaturehr]

Also, doing MMII for GB would make me explode.  While most people don't seem to like MMII on GB, it (and MMIII) is my fav. game, so the see MMII in color, literal lifelong dream.

[amaturehr]

sorry, I'm making too many posts, not sure if the bug found in Wiley 1 is the same as this, but on GBE+ emulator, after fighting Heat Man first, leaving the teleport room, the game soft locks.  I haven't tried other combinations of fighting other robot masters first or not, but just fyi.  I am still more than happy to play this, and happily stare at the soft locked screen

[Specialagentape]

That's quite strange. I remember GBE+ not having the best debugger support but I'll look into it at some point if the v1.01 patch doesn't fix the problem. The same routine is running when you first enter the teleport room as when you reload so I'm not quite sure where it might be having trouble. I know the emulator is in active development still too so reporting the bug to the creator of the emulator might be good

[amaturehr]

Me again... Actually, it seems to be after beating any robot master under any condition, even just the normal stages.  I just went first to Wiley to see if I noticed the bug too.  Its cool if the patch doesn't support GBE+, but yeah, after the fan fair song, and when Mega man teleports out, the screen is frozen.

[Specialagentape]

Yeah I would definitely report that bug to the GBE+ dev, that seems like an emulation issue. I haven't run into that on BGB, 3DS VC or VBA so I'm not sure what would cause that.