Dungeon Explorer brightness hack?

[ccovell]

Is anyone interested in me making a hack like this?

Example: original on left, hand-edited on right:


A little explanation:  Over 2 1/2 years ago   I got fed up with Dungeon Explorer's dark and gloomy graphics, and wondered if I could hack the ROM to brighten its palette overall.  What I did was

1) Find the palette locations in the game ROM
2) Extract them into mutiple 512-byte files
3) Write a C conversion program to change them from PCE 9-bit RGB to Pure RGB 32-bit words (00RRGGBB)
4) Import the Pure RGB as a palette on the Amiga
5) Edit the palettes in Brilliance on the Amiga ('cause it has a 9-bit palette mode)
6) Save the palettes as binary files again
7) Write a C program that does the reverse conversion
8 ) Plonk the converted PCE palette back into the ROM

As you can see, it's a convoluted process.  It's kinda hard (impossible?) to do any realtime palette editing with the PCE file, either as a binary, or as it's running in an emulator.

Does anybody know of a way to speed up the process?

[Necromancer]

Neat project.  Do you have any action screenies converted for comparison?

Does anybody know of a way to speed up the process?

Play Crystal Beans instead? 

[shubibiman]

Me want.

[nat]

That's an interesting hack... But to be honest, I never even realized how dark the graphics in the game were until I did my DE review for Brothers Duomazov. At first I thought I'd encountered a bug in the emulator's screen capture function. For some reason it doesn't seem as bad on an actual CRT TV.

[nodtveidt]

You could skip steps 2 through 7 by writing a utility that reads the data from the PCE file, allows you to modify it as an in-memory buffer, then write it back to the PCE file. Understanding the 9 bit kung fu is pretty easy, but you should know all about it since you've already done games before.

[ccovell]

A quick ingame test:


The game actually uses a single 16-colour palette for much of its overworld/underworld graphics, so that was kinda easy.  Other levels and enemies have to be hacked later.

I could write my own editing program, but nothing beats the RGB/HSB sliders and pixel view of a real, professional paint program.  My method is working out fine enough for now.

[Arkhan]

Its a neat idea, but if you're playing on a real system and don't like it, its easier to just diddle the TV knobs up to where you want them, and save yourself the tedium of doing what you're doing, since most of us are play-it-on-real-hardware purists.

[Duo_R]

Playing in component really helps.