With our sprites now beautifully colorized, it's finally time to focus on what will make our colorization really shine — backgrounds. In this entry, we'll try to get the backgrounds as close to the final look as possible.
In previous entries we finally got to a point in which our custom palettes are loaded and ready to be used. Now, it's time to find out which values to change to apply them to the graphics, and more specifically in this entry, to the sprites.
In the previous entry, we went over the first steps to set the stage and start our colorization. This time we'll take a look at the chosen game, Kirby's Dream Land, and try to determine the overall complexity of the project.
We'll have to take into consideration questions such as whether the graphics are compressed, how much free space do we have in the ROM and, in later entries, if the sprites require more work than usual.
With this insight in hand, we'll finally be able to get into action and load custom palettes that we'll later use to colorize different metasprites.
Generally speaking, the Game Boy Color is a faster Game Boy with more memory that can display colors. That means that, believe it or not, every Game Boy game is a few routines away from being a full-fledged GBC game.
You may be wondering if this is as daunting a task as it seems. Well, depending on your knowledge of the system one could argue that it actually is not. However, doing it properly, loading every palette and attribute at the correct time and translating every effect takes an awful lot of work.
Did you know? The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening's engine was not an original creation; it was actually taken from a Nintendo title made a year earlier known in Japan as Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru.
Well, not really. I already tried to debunk this story with a bit of journalistic research, but a point I could definitely expand on further is that they are very different games internally. How so? Let's take a look at it.