[Graphics] [Fire Red] Change the colours of the backgrounds and other elements

[McPaul]

I want to change the colours of the Pokémon status screen, where are they located?

As well as the colours of the Pokédex menu.

How do I find them? Is there a tool to do this?

Thanks in advance!

 

[DrFuji]

It's pretty easy to find any pallet once you know the trick to it. Firstly, open your ROM in VBA and get to a point where the pallet that you want to change is on screen. In this case, it would be opening the Pokedex. Secondly, in VBA go to 'Tools > Pallet Viewer'. This will open up a separate window that displays all the pallets onscreen at that moment, separated into those used by backgrounds and sprites. The pallet that you want to edit will be somewhere in those 32 pallets. If there are multiple pallets that use the same/ similar colours you can narrow down which one you want by opening up the Map Viewer/ OAM viewer and clicking on the tile whose pallet you want to edit as it will be displayed in the viewer.

Once you know which pallet it is you want to edit, you need to find it in a hex editor so open up the hex editor's search function. In the pallet viewer, click on the first colour in your pallet and in the bottom left there should be a hexadecimal value given to you. Reverse the value's bytes (so if it says 0x1234, put 34 12 in your hex editor) and do this for the first four colour in your pallet. This is to narrow your search and ensure you find what you're looking for. If you get a result, make sure that the following colour values match up inbetween VBA and your hex editor to be safe. Also, check if the pallet that you've found is the only one as sometimes there are duplicate pallets where you have to go through and edit them one by one. There are also sometimes compressed pallets such as in battle backgrounds (and irc, the status screen colours you're looking for) so that may hamper your efforts as well.

Now that you've found your pallet's offset, you can either edit your pallet directly through the hex editor or open it up in another tool like APE~

 

[McPaul]

Well if it's a compressed palette how do I do? I'ts already so hardcore without this

 

[DrFuji]

Compressed pallets (despite the name) are actually larger than regular pallets. They are generally 40 bytes long (rather than 32 bytes) and look like this: 10 60 00 00 00 [first four colours] 00 [second four colours] 00 [third four colours] 00 [fourth four colours].

I just checked and the type icons's pallet in FR isn't compressed, but it is in Emerald. You can find the FR pallet at 0xE95DBC.

 

[McPaul]

Thanks! And if I want to use Emerald-style Type icons in FR how should I do? I already made a shot as you can see in my other thread but can't figure out how to import it due to the larger number of colours.

 

[Dr. Seuss]

Using VBA-M is the best option to find compressed pallettes. Before the screen you want to look for pallettes on VBA-M go to Tools>Logging. Check the box "SWI" and press ok. As soon as you get to the screen you want to know its compressed pallete go back to Tools>Logging. Now the pop-up window will show a lot of lines "CpuSet" you need to scroll down and look for the lines that start with "LZ77" these lines have the offsets for compressed tilesets/tilemaps/pallettes loaded. And then use tools like APE or NSE to modify compressed pallettes.

And believe me. It sounds difficult but it's actually kinda easy and useful to find compressed stuff. For me it's better to learn how to look for it instead of waiting for somebody to tell you where to find it.