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Okay, so in a 100% legit game, this makes no difference.

I can't remember which thread it was in that Runelancer had mentioned that there is actually a gap in the graphics file where Galuf should be as a mime. Using Tile layer pro, I was able to find the gap, the problem being that TLP can't make the colors correct for the file. For people that want to do games that unlock all jobs, it would be nice to fill in the blanks. All of the other characters have mimic sprites that mirror their blue mage sprites with different coloration. I've also noticed that there is a mimic sprite as an avatar for CoN. I know it was edited, but my question is if there is a full set of tiles for Mimic Galuf, and if not, what can I use to get the colors correct because if I was working with the correct colors, I don't think it would take too long to tranfer over and edit the 48 tiles from blue mage to give life to mimic galuf.

As it stands now, I experimented enough to change the face colors on the blue mage so that he was no longer wearing the eye mask. I kept referring back to the bare sprite for proper coloration on the skin tones, and it came out perfect. Were I working with the correct colors, this would probably only take me 2 hours to do in total.

Somebody with more experience hit me back, my curiosity is piqued.

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If internal struggles were as enjoyable and glamorous as the self conflicted wars within video game characters, we would all be statues, reveling in perpetual self war. -Me

Play me on Rock Band 2, GH-WT, or any other Xbox GH!
Xbox Gamertag-MeanJerry

Fraid I don't have much (if any) experience with FFV or the SNES's hardware, but maybe I can offer some insight.

SNES graphics are palettized. This form of compression creates a list of colors and points into this table instead of having a byte for red, green, and blue (actually the SNES has 5-5-5 components, or rather 5 bits for each R, G, and B components. This means 2 bytes per pixel.) The SNES, in fact, often reduces colors to 16 per sprite, so it takes half a byte (4 bits) to represent a pixel. There's a reason for this: the SNES's VRAM (video memory) is limited. While it can display up to 32,767 colors (most people will tell you it's 65,536 but the last bit is reserved) we can't use the full scope of displayable colors or we'll rapidly fill up and exceed the free space in VRAM.

The palette is independant from the graphics. Which is the point I'm getting at. Each pixel looks up the color in CGRAM (palette space) and renders it accordingly. If you change the contents of the palette, the graphics don't change. So there's absolutely no way to tell which colors go where until you have a palette safely loaded into memory. The game is programmed to load the colors at offset xyz at some point, the graphics at offset xyz, and then link them together - there is no way you can just look at the data and say, "Aha! This is the blue mage palette!" (Unless you recognize it, but that's not something a program can do )

So. Long story short. TLP cannot guess what the palette will be. That's impossible. It has no access to VRAM nor CGRAM, it just unpacks image data and attempts to display it. Since the color data is not stored with the graphics, it has to make up its own colors. There's absolutely no way of getting the real colors short of either specifying them yourself or having the program run around in the code (a very non-portable solution!!)

Inserting graphics at those blank spaces will result in weird results. I don't have the FFV palette data yet (looking for it, coincidentally enough - I may have it tomorrow) but anything could exist there. The palette could be all blank, or it could be the default Galuf palette. You'll have to tweak the palette too (expect another post once I have the right offset... until then, feel free to look for it. )

The SNES, like I said, stores its data as 5-5-5 components. 5 bits per component. Fire up calc.exe and go into hex mode (scientific view -> hit F5) Put in 7E0B and hit F8 to go into binary mode.

0 11111 10000 01011 (the 0 and spaces are my additions)

Blue: binary 11111 -> decimal 31
Green: binary 10000 -> decimal 16
Red: binary 01011 -> decimal 11

So 7E0B (it will be stored as 0B 7E - the SNES reverses bytes for endian-related reasons; don't worry if you don't know what little/big endian are) is 31,16,11 or some kind of lightish blue.

Each color (in groups of 16 usually; this means palettes are in packs of 32 bytes) will be stored like this. Byte2 Byte1 Byte2 Byte1 Byte2 Byte1... If you change them, you have to do some calculus. Suppose you want to have R:255 G:128 B:80 (some kind of brownish-red color) you can just do some basic math and reduce it to the SNES's model.

R = (255 / 255) x 31 = 31
G = (128 / 255) x 31 = 16
B = ( 80 / 255) x 31 = 10

The max value a component can have in 24bpp is 255, so we divide by that to get a fraction, which we can then easily multiply by 31 (the max value SNES components have) to get our component in 5 bit format. So... (you can use calc.exe to convert decimal to binary; enter it in decimal and hit F8.)

R = 11111
G = 10000
B = 01010

Color: 0 01010 10000 11111, 2A1F in hex.

Final color: 1F 2A

Hopefully this helps.

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

my main problem is this:

I made it work. Actually had a stationary position only sprite in the .smc file.

All the controls are graphical tho, no code to speak of.

Although I just figured out that "pallette editor" meant more than just pick which color to draw with. I can change the RBG values of what it's reading. I can load screenshots of actual game into fireworks (i love my fireworks), and it will tell me the RGB vals for pixels, find their location in TLP, and tada! colorize and edit. Not everything came out roses in TLP, but like you said about the sprites... hopefully, mimic Galuf will be inserted and colorized by next week. but I definitely don't know any of the hack insert stuff, so i'm actually saving the new pallette right over the old one on FF5.smc (don't worry, I'm not using my current play copy, and I made like 5 backups.)

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If internal struggles were as enjoyable and glamorous as the self conflicted wars within video game characters, we would all be statues, reveling in perpetual self war. -Me

Play me on Rock Band 2, GH-WT, or any other Xbox GH!
Xbox Gamertag-MeanJerry

IIRC, Djibriel made the Mimic Galuf sprite that you now use for your avatar, but it could've just been that I remember Dji posting about Mimic Galuf and instantly associated the two. Someone made a patch for incorporating that sprite into the ROM, if that's what you are looking for. I don't recall where to find the patch, But maybe Dji or someone else has a clue where it is, since I remember him talking about this before.

If that's not what you're looking for or if you want to do it yourself anyways, go ahead.

This post has been edited by Caesar on 1st March 2007 20:51

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Is PJ

I'm not sure I understood what you were doing, but you can't save palettes in TLP. It has no way of knowing where the palette comes from. Like I said in my post, image data and color data are seperate. TLP edits image data, not palette data. For an editor to edit colors, it would have to be built specifically for a given set of graphics for a specific game.

You can edit the palette you view your graphics with, but not the palette loaded by the emulator because this is not linked with graphics at all. The moment you start editing graphics, you have to forget about colors 100%.

I work with black and white palettes for this reason (from white to black and vice-versa.) Graphics show up very well like this and it helps remove the temptation of relying on what colors you see onscreen.

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

It's as I've always been told...
"You don't know alot about anything, but you know just enough to get yourself into trouble!"

I took the Blue mage sprites, painted the mask off of his face, and changed the light and dark blues into the light and dark reds that made up the inside of his cape. I placed these images back into the blank spot in the file, and viola! Mimic Galuf. The colors are far less than desired, but I could work that out in time, now that I have a working version of his face and actions.

Here's what i got:









Thank god school got cancelled today!

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If internal struggles were as enjoyable and glamorous as the self conflicted wars within video game characters, we would all be statues, reveling in perpetual self war. -Me

Play me on Rock Band 2, GH-WT, or any other Xbox GH!
Xbox Gamertag-MeanJerry

I found the palette data last night (and will ost a screenshot in the FFV thread ) Unfortunately I was stupid enough to forget to jot it down and bring it over. Anyhow. It's something like D4:3AC0. That might be it, and if I'm wrong, I'm not too far off. That's in hiROM, so remove 0xBFFE00 to get the right file offset.

The palettes rock. Each job, for each character, has its own palette. Uber-surprise: IIRC, Galuf has one in his mimic slot.

In case you haven't read my first post, I'll take the liberty of reminding you a palette is 32 bytes in length - 2 bytes per color, 16 colors per palette table.

(No, it cannot be loaded into TSP - it doesn't work that way. Unless you enter the colors by hand into the palette editor. A computer program is not a magical entity - it needs some means of gathering information to acheive a task. And like I said in my first post, palette and image data are seperate.

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."