metroid II color hack?? techy knowledge needed

[optmusprimenumber]

damn that was easy, cool beans

[flamepanther]

um, if you stick the GB cart into a GBA it's displayed in color anyway. The original GB cart had color information stored in it, so Samus looks like Samus. Not sure the point of the patch?

Just a minor point of contention, but the color data for Metroid II (and other pre-Color, pre-Super GameBoy carts) is stored in the GBA, GameBoy Player, or Super GameBoy, not in the game cart. Whatever device is playing the game reads the game's internal ROM name and goes "Hey, I know this game! Here are some color presets!" and there you go. That's why you get different colors on the game depending on whether you're using a GBA or a Super Gameboy, and why you get no colors at all in an emulator (most of which support Super GameBoy and GameBoy Color since long before now).

The colors used by the GBA and GB Player do look pretty nice, but they're very rudimentary. The original GameBoy classifies the tiles it displays into different categories, depending on how they need to be rendered. These categories are built into the system: Background, Sprite layer 1, Sprite layer 2, and Window. All the GBA does is color everything in the background layer in shades of blue-gray, sprite layer 1 in red and yellow shades, Sprite layer 2 in white and green, etc. It is basically coincidence that this mostly works out really well in terms of how the graphics were handled in the original cartridge--one which Nintendo took good advantage of when programming the GBA.

The Super GameBoy doesn't treat these layers separately when colorizing games, which is why it renders SR388 in all red and yellow just like Samus.