Question re: Gamecube GBA adapter.

[Pantechnicon]

So I just got a hold of one of these things. I was plugging in some of my old black and white GB titles to see what they'd look and play like on the big screen.

What I noticed was that every old black and white Nintendo-produced game I stuck in the thing seemed to run with a pre-defined color pallette. Baseball, for example, loaded up with the colored players on an honest green baseball field. Tertris, Super Mario Land etc all ran in colors. Third-party games did not.

So what I'm wondering is: a) Can anyone confirm whether or not Nintendo wrote a color scheme every last one of their old games played on this adapter? b) Is this the main purpose of needing a boot disc to use the adapter? Come on, you Cube experts help me out here. Thanks.

[whoisKeel]

read the manual :)

you can change the colors by holding down different combinations of buttons while turning on the gbplayer. this is the same for gba, and i assume, the same color schemes.

[Querjek]

Yep, I believe you have to press a direction plus A or B to change schemes.

[jdc]

Yep....there are no such things as black and white gameboy games. They're all color.....in a round about way.

[The Manimal]

grayscale :D

white, black, two shades of gray.

[davidbrit2]

A lot of games do have predefined color palettes, and I believe this was a feature of the original Gameboy Color ROM. You can have separate 4-color palettes for the background, and I think two sprite categories. So the GBC probably had a lookup table in ROM that would select "good" colors based on what you were playing. It probably just looked at the game ROM for a title signature or something like that. And each palette definition would have only taken up a few bytes, I suspect. 12 color defs total, with a total palette of about 1024 (I think) would make it take just 24 bytes per game in a worst-case 2-byte color definition setup.

But this is largely just educated speculation. Assume I'm 80% correct, ±10%. ;-)

[Pantechnicon]

read the manual :)

you can change the colors by holding down different combinations of buttons while turning on the gbplayer. this is the same for gba, and i assume, the same color schemes.

Bought it used. No manual. Anyway, I figured that such a function existed and found the appropriate buttons, etc. to control screen size, swap games and pallettes and the like.


A lot of games do have predefined color palettes, and I believe this was a feature of the original Gameboy Color ROM. You can have separate 4-color palettes for the background, and I think two sprite categories. So the GBC probably had a lookup table in ROM that would select "good" colors based on what you were playing. It probably just looked at the game ROM for a title signature or something like that. And each palette definition would have only taken up a few bytes, I suspect. 12 color defs total, with a total palette of about 1024 (I think) would make it take just 24 bytes per game in a worst-case 2-byte color definition setup.

This makes sense. I should point out that I'm not a total noob to the concept. I own an SNES with a Super Game Boy adapter so I'm familiar with the idea of changing pallettes. I also know for a fact that some non-color games e.g. - Link's Awakening and Donkey Kong, had built in pallettes specifically for use on SNES. But the games still look different on the Cube. Now that could be due to hardware differences between the machines (specifically, between the Super GB and the GBA adapter). But I've just still got this hunch that there's more to it than that. Think I'll break out the SNES and do some side-by-side comparisons. If I find out anything interesting I'll let everybody know.

[davidbrit2]

I think the Super Gameboy worked by dynamically redefining the four display colors for specific regions of the screen, whereas the GBC colorizes by using the same 12 colors throughout - but can apply them more specifically (background, sprites, etc).

You can kind of experiment with this if you're brave enough to switch carts with the SGB on. Play an SGB game that has a bunch of different colors on something fairly static like a title or menu screen. Pull the cart out and put in something like Super Mario Land, and you'll see the SGB region palettes still defined for the old B&W game. It produces a peculiar effect like the old arcade games that used cellophane on a monochrome screen to produce "color".

The GBC is not compatible with the SGB extensions, though, so the best you'll get is a tolerable palette that stays the same the entire time. Unless of course you're playing an actual GBC game with the ability to specify a color palette for individual sprites and background blocks. It's sort of like the NES, if I'm not mistaken.