I was trying to make an Item Icon but then I was told that the colors used couldn’t be supported by the GBA. Then I started looking for some tutorials to find out the mistake and how to fix it but I mostly find Splicing or how to reduce the palette to 16 colors.
Exactly how do I check what colors can be used in my sprites for inserting?
With items the issue is not if the GBA can display those colors or not, that’s not a problem you are going to have to deal with, the issue here is that all items use the same palette, you can’t just use as many palettes as you want at once, there’s a 16 background palettes and 16 sprite palettes at once limit. This is just how the GBA works.
You can have however many palettes you want in the ROM, they just can’t all be used at once.
Since there’s a limit to how many palettes you can use, having a different palette for each icon would be very costly (think about it, there’s menus that display up to 10 items at once, and that’s with mone other things on-screen too), for that reason the game uses the same palette for all items. If you make a new item you have to use this already existing palette, that’s why you were told your colors were wrong.
Skill icons from the skill system also use this same palette for the very same reason.
I’m sure if you ask around in spritans in the discord server someone will get you the palette you need and all that, if it’s not already pinned.
However, to answer your question about which colors the GBA can use: a lot of them, all of the ones you would want, really, the limitation is in depth only, some shades are lost so if you tried to display two very similar colors that you made on a higher depth then they would end up looking exactly the same, it’s not like some older systems that had a specific set of colors available or anything like that.
Or even easier: ANY color you can make in usenti, the GBA can display.
Thanks! You solved all of my doubts. Now all that’s left is hunt for the whole Item Palette so I can save it on Photoshop.
By the way, when it comes to Battle Sprites, they also follow one palette?
Each battle animation has it’s own individual 16 color palette
Really? Since everyone uses the same skintone and blue uniforms I thought they only had a palette for the user and another one for the enemy’s. Does that mean I can something like a green alligator riding a red motorcycle and load it with its own palette without issue?
All default battle anims use a palette depending on their allegiance, however you can override that palette with a custom one set specifically for that character.
tldr: yes you could have a green alligator riding a red motorcycle if it is in 16 colors
Good.
The reason why all classes/characters have separate palettes is because the animation colors are chosen by the order of colors instead of the colors themselves. Using the same palette for a Soldier and a Mage can heavily screw up the colors for one, and make it look like vomit or mercury or something. It’ll work fine, it’ll just be ugly. Each class, and sometimes character, has its own palette because the order matters.
So that’s why my thief looks like a cowboy when I put him the cavalier palette.
There’s no good reason why animations should be limited to using the same palette over and over, you only ever see two battle animations at once, no matter how you go about it that’s going to take up 2 palettes, these palettes being always the same would grant no benefit.
Maybe space? It was not until recently that I found out the humongous quantity of things you can insert in one only ROM. I don’t even know what do you need to do so as to fill it completely, maybe making a whole new set of chapters while keeping the original game in there at the same time.
Events, palettes and text take next to no space, what takes up the space is mostly graphics and music.
Talking about music, I saw a Patch meant for using formats outside of MIDI. Wouldnt that suck a heavy lot of space from it?
I’ve never heard of such a patch but if you insert raw music then yeah it’s going to take a whole lot of space, you are meant to insert samples to use for midis instead of full songs.
I don’t know why there would be a patch for that or how it would work, you can already insert music into any GBA ROM, there is no difference between music and samples as far as I know.
In fire emblem you would just be using a midi that has one sample, which is the whole song. I guess. I’m not a music guy.
Found it!
Sorry, it was not the format, just extending the MIDI performance. Still, I think it would be weighty depending on what you do with it.
Music is indeed very heavy spacewise.
yep, you’re looking at at least several megabytes for a two-minute song, so my advice is always “don’t waste your time/space and use something else instead”