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Comment by ihuman | Hacker News Reader

Is this how Game boy games have color when playing on a Game Boy Color or Advanced?

A brief search[1] turns up that the GBC had a few palettes actually built into the hardware, so games that were released before the system out would end up being colorized by one of these; supposedly for some first-party games, the system would actually determine what game was being played and select a more appropriate palette.

Once the system had been released, games could be made in "dual-mode" which would support a monochrome palette when played on the original hardware, but would use custom colorization on the GBC[2].

I'm trying to find more technical sources but haven't located any yet, so if anyone help me find more information I'd be very interested.

EDIT: I found a little more information. Here's[3] someone who disassembled the GBC boot ROM. It looks like on boot, the system would check to see if the inserted cartridge is one of 93 first-party games, and apply a specified palette; otherwise, it would just apply a default palette.

[1]: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=497582

[2]: http://www.allgame.com/platform.php?id=17662

[3]: http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?19247...

SGB palettes aren't recognized by the CGB, which instead only has a hardcoded set of 12 to apply on regular GameBoy games. Backwards-compatible CGB games used another incompatible format. Some games (Pokémon Yellow) contained both. If you want you can see all the gory details in The Game Boy Programming Manual (huge PDF):

http://chrisantonellis.com/files/gameboy/gb-programming-manu...

I knew that the CGB allowed you to pick among the hardcoded 12 color palettes (by holding down various key combinations at the Nintendo logo boot screen), but after reading the article I was curious about this as well. I wonder why they decided not to make the CGB recognize the SGB palettes?

Because SGB palettes weren't intended to be used on the whole screen at once (or, at least, you couldn't assume that they were intended to be used that way). What looks great on one region might look terrible on the entire screen. So they decided to simply set it up so that if you wanted to make a palette available on the whole screen, you could do so by making a CGB version of it.

Interesting article, though. It would be interesting to see more games designed this way, though I doubt that'll ever happen. Pity, that.

It would just use a default palettization system.

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