DKC Atlas Forum

I don't like the fact that there is no COLOR code in DKC3 GBA, so for my first color-based GBA hack ever, I went ahead and hacked Kiddy's clothes myself! I changed them to green, like the COLOR code in DKC3 SNES. I didn't do anything else with this hack, though I did make the flag green when Kiddy touches it, too. Unfortunately, I couldn't find where the color palettes for the bonus screens were located in the ROM (I spent about 30-45 minutes looking, so it's probably compressed... and this isn't the first time I've dealt with compressed data... argh).

So, here's a few screenshots, comparing the old one with the hack I made:




Yeah... that's about it.

Because the offsets are different for each version (more on that below), there are different patches for each of them. I made patches for the American and European versions. I haven't made one for the Japanese version yet, but I will if anybody wants me to.

For reference, here's where these bytes are located in the ROM in the American version:

• 0E3DD8-0E3DF7 = Dixie Kong
• 0E3DF8-0E3E17 = Kiddy Kong
• 0E4278-0E4297 = Dixie's Flagpole (In the level)
• 0E4298-0E42B7 = Kiddy's Flagpole (In the level)
• 0E42B8-0E42D7 = Gray Flagpole (In the level)
• 0E5658-0E5677 = Dixie Kong (Bleak/Banana Bird Cave)
• 0E5678-0E5697 = Kiddy Kong (Bleak/Banana Bird Cave)
• 0E5AD8-0E5AF7 = Flagpole (Not all coins)
  • 0E5AD8-0E5AE7 = Pole
    
  • 0E5AE8-0E5AEF = Dixie
    
  • 0E5AF0-0E5AF7 = Kiddy
• 0E5AF8-0E5B17 = Flagpole (All coins)
  • 0E5AF8-0E5B07 = Pole
    
  • 0E5B08-0E5B0F = Kiddy
    
  • 0E5B10-0E5B17 = Dixie

Here are the offsets for the European version:

• 0E4FA0-0E4FBF = Dixie Kong
• 0E4FC0-0E4FDF = Kiddy Kong
• 0E5440-0E545F = Dixie's Flagpole (In the level)
• 0E5460-0E547F = Kiddy's Flagpole (In the level)
• 0E5480-0E549F = Gray Flagpole (In the level)
• 0E6820-0E683F = Dixie Kong (Bleak/Banana Bird Cave)
• 0E6840-0E685F = Kiddy Kong (Bleak/Banana Bird Cave)
• 0E6CA0-0E6CBF = Flagpole (Not all coins)
  • 0E6CA0-0E6CAF = Pole
  • 0E6CB0-0E6CB7 = Dixie
  • 0E6CB8-0E6CBF = Kiddy
• 0E6CC0-0E6CDF = Flagpole (All coins)
  • 0E6CC0-0E6CCF = Pole
  • 0E6CD0-0E6CD7 = Kiddy
  • 0E6CD8-0E6CDF = Dixie

And finally, here are the patches, below:

viewtopic.php?f=33&t=606#p11387

Old patches:
In closing, I'm really glad that the GBA uses the exact same 15-bit RGB format as SGB and GBC games. That made it really easy for me. Though GBA games are more tedious since they use more colors...

EDIT: Replaced the file since there was something screwed up about it earlier for some reason...

EDIT 2: Added European offsets and patch.

EDIT 3: Fixed one offset and added two more.

GBA uses palettes? O.o I didn't expect that. Although I would made the darker green a little darker, it looks like aquamarine in some way.
Still, this looks really cool. It must've been a lot of hard work! I'll download it once I get to my computer xP

Kiddy14 wrote:GBA uses palettes? O.o I didn't expect that.

.. what did you expect, then..?

Either way, great job. Could be a bit darker but still a good job.

Yeah, GBA does use palettes. How else can it display colors?

And now that you two point it out, it IS a little bright... I'll darken it a bit when I get the chance to. It'll take me a while to do, though, since I'm not as used to GBA as I'm used to GBC (it uses more colors, making it more time-consuming)...

Also, anybody want me to make Dixie more purple, like the COLOR code in DKC3?

EDIT: So I fixed this patch up and it looks better now! Also, I gave Dixie a treatment too and made her dark purple, like the COLOR code in DKC3. I also made the flags look better too. I also noticed that there's a separate palette for fighting Bleak and visiting Banana Bird caves, so I had to take care of that. Here are some screenshots:








And here are the new patches below:

All right, I've been trying to figure out how to hack the color palette in the bonus stage screens. I tried everything I could think of, but nothing has worked. First, I tried the obvious and searched for part of the color palette with a hex editor. For example, part of Kiddy's palette in the bonus screen is in the 11th row... you can see the blue colors here:



So I searched for this blue part (the other colors were in different rows, oddly). The light blue colors were 7FF4, 7FEF, 7B2B, 49E8, and 2D05, so in the hex editor that I use (I use XVI32, but any hex editor would have been OK), I searched for the hex string F4 7F EF 7F 2B 7B E8 49 05 2D. Inconveniently, no results came up. Even when I searched for fewer colors at a time (e.g. F4 7F EF 7F), nothing came up. And when I searched for one color at a time, there were matches, but none of them were the right color.

Then I used Advanced Palette Editor and searched for the colors with LZ77, which is a compressed palette. Still, there was NOTHING.

Then, I tried using Corrupt (a ROM corruptor that I normally use that has helped me on many, many occasions in the past) to try to find the palette. The best I could find was that roughly in the ECF00-ECFFF* range (though this is a rough estimate... while this range had an effect, it's possible that bytes outside this range may also affect what I found, because I didn't test this thoroughly), it sorta affected the palettes in the bonus screen (along with some other screens), but mostly, all it did was just shift the colors around and throw them off; it didn't change them at all. And I couldn't figure out the pattern at all, because it just looks like random bytes!

Yeah... I tried everything and I couldn't figure it out. Compression is the bane of my existence when it comes to ROM hacking, and this isn't the first time I've come to a dead end due to compression. Anybody else have an idea on how to do it?

*This is an American offset, other offsets may be slightly different. From what I've seen, to get a European offset (at least when it's related to colors), just take an American offset and add $11C8.