smwcr091.zip | smwcr091.txt
smw-cr09.zip | smw-cr09.txt
discussion thread
It's a shame that such a cool remix got mangled with bright, washed-out colors. A lot of games from that period met the same fate, brightened so they would be easier to view on the original non-lit Gameboy Advance. Nowadays, my old GBA doesn't see much action (and I bet yours doesn't either), so I thought I'd try my hand at reverting the palettes to their original SNES shades.
Finally, this updated classic is more suited towards gracing your GBA SP, GB Micro, GB Player, or DS (or I guess your emulator, if you're into that sort of thing).
It wasn't very difficult once I figured out what I was doing (yes, I'm somewhat new at this). I just copied the hex straight over from the SNES ROM to the GBA, then playtested and made adjustments where necessary. Some colors were deliberately changed, so I had to account for that.
There's a few new tiles that use their own palettes, so I had to come up with those colors on my own, borrowing from existing colors. For the balloon, I played the game on my GBA with minimal lighting and tried to get as close to that as possible.
For the Princess, I went with a hybrid between her original SNES colors and her illustration in the instruction manual. There's a few other new things here and there, but I haven't played through the game fully yet, so I probably didn't catch all of them.
The big, wooden "mashers" in the first castle were all kinds of screwed up, they were the wrong color and the tiles were in the wrong order. Hopefully fixing them didn't mess anything up.
There's a few issues I'd still like to fix, though. In a lot of the boss rooms, the floor tiles are using background palette 2 (grayish brown) instead of 6 (yellow). I don't exactly know how to fix this yet, but once I do, I'll get right on it. I was also thinking about fixing a few errors that were also in the original SNES one, but that might be pushing it a bit.
Let me know if you catch anything I missed. Like I said, a lot of changes were deliberate (like they changed the colors of the 1up icons), but I probably missed some of the new things, and I might've missed a sky background color in a level or two.
In the mean time, I've got a much more difficult/annoying hack ahead of me...
...this one needs it pretty bad, though, so it'll be worth the frustration ;)