Kirby's Dreamland in Color?

[tabor62]

I picked up Kirby's Dream Land at a yard sale recently for only $1. It had an old Gamestop sticker on it but that was fine.
5011 5012
It seems like a legitimate copy, but when I turned it on, it looked like this:
5013

I always thought that only the black DX carts turned into color when played on a GBC/GBA.
Can somebody tell if this is normal or explain what is going on?

[joshnickerson]

I picked up Kirby's Dream Land at a yard sale recently for only $1. It had an old Gamestop sticker on it but that was fine.
5011 5012
It seems like a legitimate copy, but when I turned it on, it looked like this:
5013

I always thought that only the black DX carts turned into color when played on a GBC/GBA.
Can somebody tell if this is normal or explain what is going on?

There are twelve different color pallets that are built into the GBC upon boot up, which you can determine manually by button combination at the GAMEBOY boot up screen. The GBC can also detect when certain games are inserted, and will boot to that color scheme automatically (you can also manually over-ride this at the boot up screen, if you wish)

Essentially, the hardware assigns one color scheme to the sprites, and a different one to the background, which helps make things easier to see.

I believe there are also several games that have their own unique color scheme, custom built into the GBC hardware, Metroid II being one of them. It looks VERY nice with GBC colors.

[tabor62]

There are twelve different color pallets that are built into the GBC upon boot up, which you can determine manually by button combination at the GAMEBOY boot up screen. The GBC can also detect when certain games are inserted, and will boot to that color scheme automatically (you can also manually over-ride this at the boot up screen, if you wish)

Essentially, the hardware assigns one color scheme to the sprites, and a different one to the background, which helps make things easier to see.

I believe there are also several games that have their own unique color scheme, custom built into the GBC hardware, Metroid II being one of them. It looks VERY nice with GBC colors.

So basically there are some original grey cartridge Gameboy games that have color when played on the GBC?

[joshnickerson]

They will ALL have some color when played on the GBC. It's basically just a hardware effect of the GBC.

[tabor62]

I see, I always thought only the black cartridges had color.
Thanks for clearing this up for me.

[o.pwuaioc]

Only the black/clear cartridges have color coded into the game. The GBA is adding the color in this case, though.

[Jorpho]

Here's a complete list of all classic "B&W" Game Boy games that will bring up a particular palette on the GBC:
http://tcrf.net/GBC_BIOS

[stalepie]

I played it in blue last year cause I thought it looked best that way. Alot of gameboy games do imo. So you hit "left" when powering on to get blue, I think.

[theclaw]

Many games had color effects added or removed in later editions. This isn't one of them, simply a GBC feature here.

What people often don't care/realize is SGB could access the SNES. Almost no dev bothered with it.
Nonetheless means emulators must run simultaneous GB and SNES cores to emulate an actual SGB unit. Most emus don't, only loading SGB colors/borders by different methods. Ignoring the 16bit side.

Most interesting is SGB Space Invaders for including actual SNES mode. Full screen full color 16bit. Down to that very same NTSC/PAL region check Nintendo mandated in SNES software.

And of course GBC+SGB we all know doesn't officially exist. Some emus disregard hardware specs to recreate the likely effect.