Homebrew DSBuff or similar programm question.

[DroRox]

I think this goes here?
Well anyways I use DSBuff to change the icons on the DS games/ homebrew.
Is there any way to bypass the 16 color limit.
Or another program that can?

 

[jurassicplayer]

I would judge the topic closer to Rom Hacking, but meh.
There isn't any way to go beyond the 16 color limit.

 

[DroRox]

Well that's very black and white. :/
Damn.

 

[FAST6191]

Rominator got some icon editing abilities at once point but otherwise we tend to point people at romer
http://filetrip.net/f222-RomeR-2-1-Beta.html

As for the icons you might be able to convince someone to support an alternative format (although I would not put money on it) but otherwise you are stuck with 16 colours.

 

[DroRox]

I guess I'll ask since it's killing me.
How does homebrew and even nintendo games use more then the 16 limit?
Is it something you can only do if you're the one making the game/app. Like it's in the coding?

 

[FAST6191]

The GBA and DS video hardware supports
4bpp (4 bits per pixel- 16 combinations and thus 16 colours at a time)
8bpp (256 combinations)
and bitmap (15 bit colour although each pixel is 16 bits)

The first two are palette images (think paint by numbers- each 4 bit pixel says which part of the palette to use) so they can use 15 bit colours. With only 4 bits per pixel it can only have 16 of them at a time (well 15 and transparent) but 8 bits per pixel allows for 256 total combinations if you want it. There are some other things you can do to say nothing of all the things the video hardware allows. I will spare a discussion of the GBA video hardware though but if you are interested http://www.coranac.com/tonc/text/video.htm

The DS roms are hard coded to use 4bpp for the icon though.

 

[DroRox]

Last thing.
On MS Paint I'm forced to use use the 16-colors preinstalled on the 16 Color Bitmap format. Is it true for all programs? Or is there a program I can use to create my own 16 color pallette?

 

[FAST6191]

As a rule if you want to do anything in image editing one avoids paint (if you are after free programs paint.net and GIMP are great and I usually have a copy of irfanview to hand) but try double clicking on the colours.