Gameboy Color Colorized Games

Gameboy Color Colorized Games
by Great Hierophant on 2009-12-13 (#53984)

I have been trying to determine which of the original Gameboy games the Gameboy Color supports by using custom palettes. Not only do all of Nintendo's developed games have support, a few games from second or third parties also saw some support on the device. I believe that all have some kind of Nintendo connection. Since MESS supports using the officially and recently dumped Gameboy Color Boot ROM, I used it to identify what I believe are almost all the Gameboy games that use custom palettes on the Gameboy Color.

Since some of these games have multiple versions, I believe the Gameboy Color determines whether it supports a Gameboy game by checking the game's name in the cartridge header. Since there are no human-readable ASCII strings in the dumped boot ROM, I would guess that the ROM generates a checksum and compares it with a table contained within it and if a match occurs, then it sets a custom palette. I have counted 54 games with support, and at 2.25 bytes, there little likelihood that the actual game names could be stored within the ROM.

http://www.fpgb.org/?page_id=17 contains all the information anyone would need to find out whether the GBC supports more than the 54 games I have discovered. Here are the games I have found:

The Gameboy Camera also probably has a custom color scheme, but I have no way to test that.

by Dwedit on 2009-12-13 (#53991)

It does indeed calculate a checksum of the game's title to select which palettes to use.

by johannesmutlu on 2012-07-08 (#96620)

according to wikipedia 89 gameboy games are supported by the gameboycolor to have their own colorpallet,games wich are not supported will have the colorpallet in default mode red green.
also the gameboycolor has 12 color pallets to chose from,but i wish nintendo had added 48 color pallets to it,by using all possible button comninations of the d-pad,A,B,start and select ,likely there is the brainboy adaptor to costumize your own colorpallet,but the way to do it is akward,and not all games will work properly,also sad is you cannot swap color pallets at any time,like on the supergameboy.
but the way how nintendo succeeded to magically turn their b&w gameboy games in color is amezing.
despites these games has only 4 shades of gray,but by colorizing these sprites and backgrounds saperately,10 colors becomes possible including transparrant.
so now,these old gb games do become more life like,more presentible,in order to closely look more like their nes versions.

by mikejmoffitt on 2012-07-16 (#96847)

If someone could build something like GBColorizer that was more reliable and stable, that'd be a great thing to have. Some games work great with it.

Re: Gameboy Color Colorized Games
by fenix00 on 2012-10-26 (#101825)

mikejmoffitt wrote:
If someone could build something like GBColorizer that was more reliable and stable, that'd be a great thing to have. Some games work great with it.

ColorIt Painter
http://www.playeradvance.org/forum/show ... hp?t=34643
http://www.mobile-dev.ch/index.php?page=pcsoft_heigboy

Check this.

Re: Gameboy Color Colorized Games
by LocalH on 2012-10-27 (#101842)

According to this, there are 144 unique cartridges that the CGB bootstrap ROM recognizes for setting palettes (including revisions and different regions).