How to colorize Game Boy games – Backgrounds | Hacker News Reader

How to colorize Game Boy games – Backgrounds

toruzz.com

149 pointsibobev20 comments

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For the uninitiated, there's quite a few finished GB to GBC conversions already:

https://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=33121.0

e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFm0aeg9nec

Even the King James Bible has been colorized for... some reason.

> Even the King James Bible has been colorized for... some reason.

*Checks link.*

> Read the Bible…in color. Search the Bible…in color. Match words from the Bible…in color. Guess words from the Bible…in color. This hack brings Wisdom Tree’s Game Boy Bible to the GBC.

> NOTE: This game has dodgy compatibility with emulators/hardware, due to it using the unlicensed Wisdom Tree mapper. BGB will work the best. View the readme for more info.

https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/6708/

Sounds like a valid reason to me. In color.

More seriously, isn’t Christianity like one of the three biggest religions in the world? Makes sense that one of its followers would find it useful to make an enhancement to the game. In color.

Turns out the real answer is that it was an April Fools joke. In color.

https://s3-external-1.amazonaws.com/romhacking-hacks/hacks/g...

> Even the King James Bible has been colorized for... some reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminated_manuscript

For hundreds of years people have been putting a large about of effort into coloring in bibles. As far as I know the book itself doesn't endorse the practice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_letter_edition

Touché

Do all the other illustrated books endorse the practice?

Like coloring books?

Yeah, I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek. What does it mean for a book to endorse making color illustrations of it's content? Why is the lack of endorsement for color illustrations in the Bible noteworthy when explicit endorsement for illustration is not really something we expect from any book.

The Game Boy Color's ability to select a color palette for GB games (from 12 built-in palettes) that didn't have their own was a good way to teach 8-year olds about how color really works in games: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Color#Color_palettes

These were useful to override the limitations of the dark caves in Red/Blue/Yellow Pokémon games, allowing yourself to "see" in the dark.

Another interesting yet provocatively named post in a similar vein

https://blog.loveconquersallgames.com/post/2350461718/fuck-t...

This is so strange. Just last week I wondered if it was possible to add colour to Game Boy games from just the ROM, I found it was and wondered if there was a tutorial somewhere.

Sadly, this page is not loading.

I only just found out the other day that if you are playing a non-colorized GB cart on a Game Boy Color, holding down a direction on the dpad when the Nintendo logo appears will let you change the palette!

There are even more; hold down A or B as well.

The author has done work on commercial releases, which is really cool for this niche.

They're also working on a colorization of one of my favorites, Kaeru no Tame: https://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=21642.0

Anyone interested in a flyby of a Pokemon themed forest HEIC/wallpaper for macOS?

I'm excited to find this. I've been aware of Game Boy colorization projects for some time, but I was always curious of how it was best to go about it. I understand the basic principles of how color memory was used in the GBC, but it always seemed a bit daunting to get into.

Most of the work I've done is raw hex editing (which I've always known wasn't ideal), so I'm curious about their methods here. I will admit that as someone familiar with the concepts but not the methods, what their compilation script is doing, or how creating it helps the project along, is a bit lost on me.

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