In memory of Ben “bushing” Byer, who passed away on Monday, February 8th, 2016.

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6,538 bytes added ,  09:31, 31 May 2009
Palette editing instructions
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You must also not use patched versions of WarioWare Twisted, Kirby's Tilt n Tumble, or Yoshi's Universal Gravitation (Topsy Turvy). The original roms are fully supported, and the patch will stop them from working.
 
You must also not use patched versions of WarioWare Twisted, Kirby's Tilt n Tumble, or Yoshi's Universal Gravitation (Topsy Turvy). The original roms are fully supported, and the patch will stop them from working.
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== Editing Palettes ==
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Games for Gameboy Advance, Gameboy Color, and Super Gameboy, are already in colour, and changing palettes for these games will have no effect. Unfortunately, some Super Gameboy games are programmed in greyscale and that can't be changed yet.
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Monochrome games for the original Gameboy had four shades of grey. But with VBA-Wii you can define your own colour palettes for these games.
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VBA Wii comes with palettes for these games: Alleyway, Baseball, Duck Tales, Kid Icarus, Magnetic Soccer, Malibu Beach Volleyball, Marble Madness, Metroid 2 ('''not''' DX), Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat II, Mortal Kombat 3, Mr. Do!, The Simpsons: Bart and the Beanstalk, Super Mario Land, Tennis, Tetris, and TMNT: Fall of the Foot Clan
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Other games will use a default palette of green background, white status bar, red sprites and blue sprites. This palette makes palette editing easier, but isn't all that suitable for most games. You should usually either edit the palette for these games, or switch to black and white mode. Or you can edit the default palette by manually editing the "sd:\vbagx\palette.xml" file.
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To switch between black and white and palette mode, start a game, go to the HOME menu, choose "Game Settings", choose "Video", and click on "Colorize Mono GB". The game "Megaman 1" will always be in black and white, to prevent flashing.
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To edit the palette for the current game, go to the HOME menu, choose "Game Settings", choose "Video", and click on "Choose Palette" to go to the Palette Editor.
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After editing the palette, the palette might appear screwed up in the game until the game changes palettes. To fix that, you might need to save the game and then start the game again, or you might need to press start to pause or go to the menu, then press start again, or you might need to try moving your sprite to the far left side of the screen.
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=== Palette Editor ===
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The colours are divided into 4 columns, which are arranged by brightness.
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The first column is the background. The bottom "background" colour is used for both the background tiles, and also for parts of the screen not covered by background tiles or any sprites. Sometimes the background can go in front of some sprites, and in those cases the bottom background colour is transparent.
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The second column is the "window". Usually that means the status bar and HUD, but it's sometimes used for other things, for example in Mortal Kombat 1, the entire game screen except the status bar is the window. VBA Wii is the only Gameboy emulator that lets you change the window colours, in other emulators the window uses the background colours.
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The third column, "OBJ", is for sprites that use palette 0. Sprites only have 3 colours, because one is always transparent. Games can choose which three of the four brightness levels will be used (that's why there are two sprite palettes). In the editor it's assumed that the first three brightness levels will be chosen. When the game chooses different brightness levels, some of those colours will be brightened or darkened in-game. Black is assumed to be 10% brightness, while dark grey is assumed to be 40% brightness. That means half the time, the colour you choose for OBJ 2 will appear 4 times darker in-game, so you might need to make it very bright. Other colours also will appear at different brightnesses, but not by a factor of 4.
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The fourth column "SPR", is for sprites that use palette 1. It has the same issues as specified above. VBA on other platforms uses the same colours for both palette 0 and palette 1, but VBA Wii lets you change them separately. Palette 1 is often used for some monsters, or for when your character takes damage, or for making collectible items flash.
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Clicking on any colour will pop up a colour editor window. You change a colour by choosing how much red, green, and blue are mixed together. You can only go up or down 8 at a time. It is in hexadecimal, which means it goes up to F instead of up to 9. F means 15.
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*red+green+blue = white
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*red+green = yellow
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*two parts red, one part green = orange
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*dark orange is brown, especially if you mix in a bit of blue
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*red+blue = magenta (pinkish purple)
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*two parts blue, one part red = purple
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*two parts red, one part blue = hot pink
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*green+blue = cyan (bright blue/green)
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*two parts blue, one part green = light blue
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*To make a colour paler, mix in a little bit of all the other colours
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Clicking on the "load / save" button will save the palette changes. Unless you are worried about a power failure, this is unnecessary, since they are saved automatically when you close. This button will have more features in the next version.
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The palette will be saved whenever you close the editor window.
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As mentioned above, after editing the palette, the palette might appear screwed up in the game until the game changes palettes. To fix that, you might need to save the game and then start the game again, or you might need to press start to pause or go to the menu, then press start again, or you might need to try moving your sprite to the far left side of the screen.
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=== palette.xml ===
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Once the emulator has created the palette.xml file (by playing a mono game), you can edit it manually to change the palettes. This might be quicker and easier than editing inside the emulator. It also lets you edit the default palette to something more suitable. And it lets you set some games to play in Black and White mode.
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You can, and should, share your palette.xml with other users if you have made palettes for other games.
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Game names in the palette.xml file are based on the ROM's internal name, not the filename. That means you only have to set the palette once even if you have several files for different regions. It also means you can use other people's xml files without worrying what they named their ROMs. If you need to know the game's internal name, you can check in VBA-M on the PC, or some websites will tell you, or you can just start editing the palette in the emulator and then it will be added to the XML file for you.
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When "use" is set to "1" that means that game will be in palette mode. When "use" is set to "0", that means that game will always be in black and white mode.
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Colours are specified in hexadecimal, in the format: 0xRRGGBB. FF is the brightest, 80 is half brightness, 00 is black. VBA-Wii only uses 15-bit colour, so the last digit will be rounded down to either 8 or 0. But if palette support is ported to other platforms, then they might not be rounded on those platforms.
    
== Controls ==
 
== Controls ==
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