GP2X Spice Up Your Emus!

[EvilDragon]

Well, I had an idea long ago... but no dev seemed to wanna do it yet.
Maybe someone likes my idea and tries to do it on the gp2x...?

Well, basically, you all do know the SuperGameBoy, which is supposed to bring some colors into GB games... though they are SOOOOO ugly!

Then, a while back, I found a little program called "GBColorizer" which I used to bring some colors into Super Mario Land (look this thread for pics and even a download!)

However, it's buggy, most GB games don't want to be turned into GBC games.

Then I thought about emulators: What if the colors won't be saved in the game rom, but as an extra file and the emulator would use the color patch on the fly? Similar to IPS? This way, we could use ALL the colors we want...

Imagine FULLY 16 bit COLORIZED GAME BOY GAMES!

And the best: It shouldn't be too hard to code!

Basically, we'd need two things:

1. A windows Tile Editor, which lets you edit the roms in fully 16bit colors and creates a corresponding patch file.
Shouldn't be too hard, a lot of Tile Editors are out there, usually, the graphics are stored unencrypted and uncompressed in the game rom.

2. An emulator, which loads up the patch and WHENEVER it draws something on the screen which has a CHANGED COLOR VALUE in the patch file, use THIS value!
Shouldn't be too hard to be coded, should it?

So... what do you devs think?
Anyone likes this idea? Possible? Or not?

If it works, we could enhance ALL the 8bit emulators out there... NES, SMS, etc., so we can actually enhance old classics with 16bit colors

 

[Mark]

I must say I like that idea. I never saw the Super Mario Land colouring you did before, but well done. Very nice indeed.

 

[reallynotnick]

Sounds pretty intersting, I would be willing to "color" some stuff if there was a mac tile editor.

 

[V3X]

this would be a great feature for the gb emus!!

i would love to play final fantasy adventure in respectable colors!!

 

[tekt5]

very nice idea!

by the way, I like the work you did on SML ED!

 

[Quiest]

I like it too, but I doubt that I would have the patience to color an entire gameboy game... (well, perhaps a game like the old Tennis, where you do not have to color very much )

 

[EvilDragon]

It's not that much!
A lot of GB games don't have that much graphics!
I did Super Mario Land in a few hours!

Only the few RPGs or the more recent games have more graphics... but also games like "Pinball - Revenge of the Gator" will be sooo much more fun

 

[BobBorakovitz]

that's a great way to improve upon older games!
I hope an author steps forward to hack an emulator up to work like this!

 

[Quiest]

Oh yeah, that Pinball game was great And it would be much nicer if colored!

 

[Tobriand]

Yes indeed... this is a somewhat brilliant idea imho. Might be worth suggesting to the authors of, say, that GBC emu which was ported in minutes to the X2 as well as to us lot, if they're still working on it - that way, with any luck, it would be already coded by the time it got to us for porting in the first place.

Not that I'm suggesting we be lazy, but if there's interest, but not among GB emu devs, then suggesting it as a new standard to PC emu writers couldn't hurt

Would also likely mean there'd be a great deal more people who'd do some rom-colourization.

 

[moz]

ok count me in

 

[Muffinman]

It's a good idea - the two Spectrum emulators below demonstrate that it can work quite well.

Spec256 and Hijackulator

 

[moz]

Project manager ED assign me a game to colorize!

 

[EvilDragon]

It's a good idea - the two Spectrum emulators below demonstrate that it can work quite well.

Spec256 and Hijackulator

​

Oh, cool, didn't know there is already a similar project

COLORIZE THE GB NOW!

A special gp2x Feature Now, where are the coders?

 

[Tobriand]

It's a good idea - the two Spectrum emulators below demonstrate that it can work quite well.

Spec256 and Hijackulator

​

*Jaw drops*

*drooool*

I *ahem* don't suppose we could *ahem* convinceRlyehtoaddthis to fSpeccy (or whatever its called) could we?

Or Tyrel for that matter (if I've remembered the name right for the creator of that other cool and wonderful speccy emu)

 

[skeezix]

Yeah, this idea has been around for awhile, though not often used. The GB emu on Palm OS, from way back 2000 or so, allowed this to great effect; they had a little DB that mapped a game to 'good colour choices' if you wanted.

I forget how other emus have done it.. a grayscale to colour map? ie: GB could do 16 gray scales, so allow a direct map of one scale level to one colour of choice, and see how it goes?

The other technique is, as you say, to alter the graphics tiles.. ie: copy the B/W tiles into colourized but still b/w tiles in another file, and then edit them with a graphic editor.

That sort of thing should be done without GP32 in mind... as a generic tool for all to use on all platforms, but of course with GP32/GP2x emus doing it first

jeff

 

[Huxley]

It's a good idea - the two Spectrum emulators below demonstrate that it can work quite well.

Spec256 and Hijackulator

​

Wow...Spec256 is really very impressive. Great idea ED, I'd love to see this on the GP2X

 

[Jaw]

another way to get color is to smack yourself over the head with a dead squirrel

but yeah, it seems like a great idea.

 

[Squidge]

Interesting. Could grab the tiles, recolor them, place into seperate file, and just use the different blocks as and when requested. Much better than just changing the grayscale into a color palette.

I'll probably have a look at later on at generating some kind of Windows app to allow you to edit the tiles. Not yet though - too much other stuff to do.

 

[DijiTao]

First off good idea.

The only tricky bit from a legality stand point is you can’t very well have people redistributing the colorized roms. The system would only be viable if you distributed colorize instruction files that would then be run against to rom (which was obtained elsewhere) to generate the tile patch set, and each user had to generate there own tile patch set. I’m pretty sure that’s what everyone is already thing but I thought I would go ahead and clarify.