[Doomkid]

Greetings folks, I just wanted to show some WIP stuff and ask for a bit of help as well.

I'm taking two popular NES bootlegs and attempting to make their colors/general appearance closer to the actual licensed product. In the case of "Super Fighter 3", a SF2 bootleg, here's what I've got so far














It's coming along alright, but I'm having issues changing the actual palette definitions for individual background and sprite tiles. On the Ken stage (the one with the boat), you can clearly see a row or two of the ship that's blue which would definitely look better if it was using the grey range present in the background instead. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to change this and what little info I can find out there is above my level of understanding.

I'd like to learn the same for sprites as well. A lot of pirate games employ the trick of stacking sprites to allow for the appearance of a greater range of colors, but sometimes there's a tile using one color scheme that would look so much better if it was simply modified to call the other one. (Mario's face in Kart Fighter is a prime example where the other palette should have been used:



I know it would make his hand appear gloveless, but simply swapping the white in that range to also be skin color would result in a much nicer looking sprite.

Thanks for reading my long semi-unfocused ramble - The long short of it is, I'd like to be able to change what palette is being called for certain sprite tiles and certain background tiles. Any 'beginner friendly' resources would be super helpful. Cheers 

[Psyklax]

Welcome to the forum!

I'm not going to go through every detail of your post for now, but I will address one point:

On the Ken stage (the one with the boat), you can clearly see a row or two of the ship that's blue which would definitely look better if it was using the grey range present in the background instead. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to change this and what little info I can find out there is above my level of understanding.

The problem here is probably how the NES attribute table works, here's a link for more info:
https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/PPU_attribute_tables

Basically, the NES can only apply palettes to four-tile blocks (two by two), so it likely that the boat in question needs to move one tile up or down to line up properly. If that's NOT the problem, then I know how to fix it, but that's probably the issue (lazy programming).

[RealGaea]

This color hack looks awesome! I hope you can disable the lock this bootleg has: all 2P fights are in Chun-Li stage.

I'll keep track of this!

[Doomkid]

[...]Basically, the NES can only apply palettes to four-tile blocks (two by two), so it likely that the boat in question needs to move one tile up or down to line up properly. If that's NOT the problem, then I know how to fix it, but that's probably the issue (lazy programming).

Thanks a bunch for the link and info.  I see what's going on here now - I guess the developer thought a slightly blue boat was better than a mostly grey ocean and was simply too lazy to shift the entire background graphic up or down by 8 pixels. I can't even think of any way to manually do that, even in something like TLP which I've used for minor touch ups but am really inexperienced with.

This color hack looks awesome! I hope you can disable the lock this bootleg has: all 2P fights are in Chun-Li stage.

I'll keep track of this!

Unfortunately I have zero knowledge of NES hacking, other than finding palette values in hex and modifying them and doing really minor stuff in TLP, but I too would love to see a proper 2P mode implemented. Not only does it stay on Chun Li's stage but it forces a fight against the computer with no way for the other player to jump back in, other than resetting. It's a shame that the best Street Fighter version for NES by far has a completely broken 2 player mode.

I would love to modify the music as well at some stage, but I find almost nothing on music editing when I search for it. There are hacks of pirate games out there that drastically improve the music (Sonic and Aladdin for NES come to mind) but I can't find any documentation on how they did it.

I appreciate the replies!

[RealGaea]

Unfortunately I have zero knowledge of NES hacking, other than finding palette values in hex and modifying them and doing really minor stuff in TLP.

I'm interested on color mods and tile editing. Most because of this:



I'll PM you for advices and details. I'll be around.