Sailormoon megadrive Enhanced color

[chevkraken]

The sailormoon megadrive is a great game and a good enhancment of the original snes game, but I always thought the palette utilisation of the megadrive was really average(for the snes version even more, but I prefer the MD version).

the game seems to hate the shades and is far too saturate, it game the impression that the megadrive palette only have only 256 colors available and it's also not very faithful the the show.

so I started to work on a color hack editing the color of the game for less saturated and more faithful color using as reference the anime render, the arcade sailormoon game and of course the game limitations for someone like me with no hacking experience and skill.

For now I have just reworked the ingame color of the sailor scout, but I want reworking the full color of the game:

screenshot comparison of each sailor scout:

Moon:
original


reworked


Mercury:
original

reworked


Mars:
original

reworked


Jupiter:
original:

reworked:


Venus:
original

reworked

[Beepatrice]

This is awesome! You really captured the look of the show, and the scouts look way better now. I can't wait to see what you do with the rest of the game.

[julayla]

Yeah that looks amazing and better. Wonder if the same can be done for the SNES games as well (especially the fighting games)

[chevkraken]

for SNES, I think it would be far easier if the SNES have a good tool for easily change the color. the SNES have much more color than the megadrive. but don't forget than snes sprite are lower resolution than megadrive one and have far less detail (so some color choice can work on megadrive and seems awkward on snes)

actually from my tries, the game make a correct use of the megadrive palette, not great, but correct(there is nearly always 50 color on screen and a full palette use even if the choice of these color could have been better)

I think color problem of the megadrive version came from the fact it's ported from the really average SNES version(and the problem of the fighting games came also from the fact the 5 sailor scout sprite were based on the first game sprites) and the fight devellopment time have been very short(less than 1 year for each game)

actually, for the megadrive version by reworking the character sprite on 2 plane and using some of the sailorscout color for the ennemies, the game could have been 2 player, it's actually the color palette limitation who make the game only 1 player.

I started yesterday to works on the background of the first level but the result are pretty average for now.

[chevkraken]

Here some news screens:

I tried to make background color for the first level more natural, but I am not sure about the result (I'll not change the background color in the other level, the way the background are colored make them nearly impossible to upgraded without fully redraw the background, wich is beyond my abilities)

Do you prefer the old version of the new?

old:

new


I have change the line color for Usagi hair and skin because this color is also used for her boots on some sprites

I have reworked sprite of the ennemies of the first levet to make their color fit better to their anime counterpart(and to look better too for Castor and Pollux)

before:


after:


before:

after:


before:


after:


the use of the palette for ennemies is pretty dumb. each ennemies use bewtween 5 and Seven color from one palette, and bewteen 1 and 3 from another palette is always loaded.

if it's allows the minimum use of palette for the full game, it make that some color are loaded but not used reducing the number of color allowed to use on the sprite sometimes.
it also make the palette load 2 time the same color, giving even more limitation to the game color.

It seem pretty clear that the game was rushed because it clearly lack optimisations.

With optimisation, the game clearly would have make 2 player mode possible and more detailled background with more color

[peixemacaco]

Hi Chevraken, good job!

I don't know if you use HivePal, but is the best tool to change colors direct to rom on MD.

This tool is on romhacking and there are tutorials on YT

Nelson

[chevkraken]

yeah, I use mostly Hivepal (I also use gsave state as complement for color test)