Back in the day, when some SNES to GBA ports were released, the color palettes for those were overbrightened to compensate the console's dark screen.
Nowadays, people play with console revisions (GBA SP, GB Micro or Nintendo DS) or modded consoles (with backlight screens) that don't require those extra saturated colors. These patches attempt to restore the original SNES colors to make them look gorgeous than ever on modern portable consoles!
Donkey Kong Country
Donkey Kong Country does not need any presentation.
Its GBA port was released in 2003 and while it was very faithful to the original and included some bonus content, it suffered from very ugly washed colors.
Also, the graphics were reduced slightly in order to fit the smaller screen, which means, the graphics tileset and palette data were totally different from the SNES so I couldn't just copy over from the SNES ROM like most of the color restorations out there. Instead, I was forced to build a tool that allowed me to preview a GBA screen while carefully picking the correct SNES colors for every single pixel on screen. It was a very tedious process but the results were worth it.
| Original GBA release | Restored colors |
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Donkey Kong Country 3
After releasing DKC1 in 2018, a lot of people asked if DKC2 and DKC3 were going to be restored as well.
There were two reasons I didn't do them back then. The first one being those games used a compression algorithm that I wasn't familiar with (although it was a common one in GBA development), I wasn't into GBA reverse engineering neither. The second one being... well... I wasn't sure if I wanted to go through the pain of restoring two more DKC games.
But, almost ten years later, I decided to give DKC2 and DKC3 another try. Learnt how the compression worked and adapted my DKC1 tool to fully support it.
| Original GBA release | Restored colors |
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The Lost Vikings
The Lost Vikings is a cult puzzle platformer developed by the very first Blizzard Entertainment employees. It was released in many platforms and got a GBA rerelease to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the game.
It is one of my childhood games and I consider the GBA version a good one. But, as you can see below, they really messed up the colors on this one, losing detail and shades on all backgrounds and characters. So I decided to give my beloved game a second chance!
| Original GBA release | Restored colors |
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Blackthorne
I never heard of Blackthorne until the emulation golden era and quickly became amazed by its dark atmosphere, just before realizing it was done by same the developers as The Lost Vikings, a game I played hundreds of times during my childhood.
For the GBA port, they decided to cripple the colors once again, so I had to be there to save the day once again!
| Original GBA release | Restored colors |
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