ROM Hack Oldies Project Tiny Toons Adventures DX for Game Boy : colorization project

[lordelan]

Very nice!

I wish there was a very detailed tutorial on how to do these color hacks so I could do some for the Turtles games (especially Radical Rescue).

 

[retro_tastic]

Very nice!

I wish there was a very detailed tutorial on how to do these color hacks so I could do some for the Turtles games (especially Radical Rescue).

Check out the How to colorize Game Boy games blog series by toruzz.

 

[lordelan]

Check out the How to colorize Game Boy games blog series by toruzz.

I thought he took that offline? Or was it just the videos?

 

[Brand Newman]

One great cheat I've learned in GB Studio is that you can use sprites to overlay on top of the background where you need color changes that normally aren't possible with background pallets alone. This is great for people's eyes, especially if you want them to blink, have mouths that move when speaking, etc. For Plucky's eyes for example, you can just do a white-on-transparent sprite over top of his regular eyes.

I've discussed the subject a bit with Marc on Discord, but right now I'm focusing on switching between palettes ingame, and most and foremost, avoid the graphics corruption than can occur if you try to access VRAM outside of VBLANK, that sort of things.

I've broken the game because of that several times, considering the more I dug into the levels, cutscenes, etc., the more conditions I had to add (I'm still a newby, so a lot of things weren't optimized, but I can see now that these things aren't just needed to run things smoothly. They're mandatory to avoid any crash).

However, I've spent the last few days revising the code a lot, and will have some new screenshots to show you soon.

Post automatically merged: Aug 24, 2024

Check out the How to colorize Game Boy games blog series by toruzz.

This is how it all started, actually!

 

[anindividual]

Very cool project! Love stuff like this.

 

[Ligeia]

It's one of my favourite GB games as well, and these WIP screenshots look promising ! Keep up the good work

 

[Brand Newman]

I have spent DAYS trying to fix a bug that would randomly load "$FE" as a ROMbank, before I understood that this value comes from 7FFF, and that each bank (except new bank $09, for whatever reason there is) as its number in it, for the game to know which rombank to load back after the "halt" function! Oh, well, this calls for two new screenshots, before I publish a little playthrough within next weeks!

 

[Maeson]

Keeps looking better and better!

 

[mdagois]

Only GBC can master double speed : so if you were to activate double speed, you'd mess up the color, and have to make modifications to the game before you could release the patch : assigning eight black and white palettes wouldn't be so hard, but for example, with Tiny Toons, the transition, the ray of light when Babs is at the theater... everything is messed up right now.

Once again, the book "Game Boy Coding Adventure" is a must-have if you want to learn about coding for game boy : it's cheap and very well done, and I haven't even finished reading it yet, but there's already so much more I can do!

I am Maximilien, the author of Game Boy Coding Adventure.
I stumbled upon this post by chance and I am very happy to see the book used for this kind of project.
Thanks a lot for mentioning the book as a source to learn assembly on the Game Boy.
Looking forward to the new version of Tiny Toons!

 

[Brand Newman]

I am Maximilien, the author of Game Boy Coding Adventure.
I stumbled upon this post by chance and I am very happy to see the book used for this kind of project.
Thanks a lot for mentioning the book as a source to learn assembly on the Game Boy.
Looking forward to the new version of Tiny Toons!

Thank you for your message, Maximilien! I'm reading your book on a daily basis, and whatever I will end up achieving with this game, I'll owe it to you (and the people on Discord who are kind enough to share their wisdom with me)!

Your book is amazing : you're a great teacher, and I hope it is and will be a success!

I'll make sure everybody who uses my patch in the future knows what a big help you were for me.

Yours truly.

 

[Brand Newman]

So, I've been exploring MMII and V to understand where the extra sprites were stored to overlay them and get more than 3 colors. I've successfully loaded them in VRAM1. Now what's left is only to make them juxtapose precisely!

 

[DaFixer]

Nice, project!
Loved that game back in the day.

 

[ShantaeFan123]

This is gonna be a cool project to see! Thanks for your work Newman, and I can't wait to see your future projects too!

Post automatically merged: Aug 17, 2024

BTW Do you know where I can watch Animaniacs? I've wanted to try watching it but ah man.

DVD, Hulu if you have a time machine and yes, the orignal was on Hulu for years before the reboot. Apple TV, Prime

 

[Brand Newman]

After more than a week, I had started to lose hope, but hey, here we are : I managed to overlay two sprites in my #tinytoons colorization project for #gameboy !

 

[Maeson]

Plucky is looking perfect there! Does increasing the sprite count affect the performance, or the double speed change helps with that too?

 

[Brand Newman]

Plucky is looking perfect there! Does increasing the sprite count affect the performance, or the double speed change helps with that too?

I haven't seen any performance drop so far. I used to, but that was before I started to optimize the code, when I was just starting and didn't know better, making several tests that would make the routine last longer than VBLANK which ended in various issues, like graphic corruption.

My main concern with overlay would be to break the limit of 40 sprites, which would end up in some of them disappearing, considering each sprite is made of 8 tiles.

But the game has a very specific way of loading sprites : it shuffles them constantly, which didn't help incorporating new ones, but might be a way to prevent any disappearance, or so I suspect...

That being said, I don't think I'm gonna push my luck too far, and will be focusing on overlaying the three heroes' sprite first and foremost : I'll see if other characters need it, but if I have to choose between overlaying secondary characters, and keeping the game as "clean" as it is on vanilla game boy, I'll go for the second option.

 

[Brand Newman]

Don't expect that kind of update too often, but I wanted to share the improvement I achieved with overlaying Babs' sprite. Ever noticed how she's the only character to have sparkles in her eyes? Probably to make her look more feminine. Anyway, a comparison!

 

[Brand Newman]

Say "Hi" to Hamton and his shadows, thanks to overlaying!

 

[SDA]

Say "Hi" to Hamton and his shadows, thanks to overlaying!

View attachment 464156

That looks pretty cool! I guess Buster Bunny shouldn't be too hard for overlays either.

 

[MeXen]

Say "Hi" to Hamton and his shadows, thanks to overlaying!

View attachment 464156

May i suggest a color scheme more akin to this to save on palette memory?