Sega Smash Pack: Sega Smash Pack - Color Restoration

The Sega Smash Pack, like many other 16-bit games ported to the GBA, had its colors adjusted to accommodate for the original console's unlit screen. However, when playing the game on a properly lit display, the colors appear atrocious. This patch restores the colors to be closer to their Genesis/Mega Drive originals, and fixes some glitches like Golden Axe's title screen and black skies.

This patch has been tested and works with the autoboot hacks, found here: http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/4882/

The Sega Smash Pack on GBA, like many other ports of 16-bit games to the console, had its colors adjusted to account for the unlit screen of the original GBA. Now that most people play GBA games on lit screens, however, people can witness these adjusted colors in all their hideousness.

On the Smash Pack in particular, this was accomplished by calling a function every time a color was about to be loaded into palette RAM. It would increase the red, green, and blue values of the color, making it brighter. Disabling the function reverts the colors back to their original state, which are surprisingly faithful to their Genesis/Mega Drive counterparts.

This patch disables the color-brightening function and adjusts palettes for situations that need it. In particular, additional work went into Golden Axe to restore its title screen, sky colors, and more.

As with my previous autoboot hacks, if you want to use this as a basis for a hack of your own, feel free! There were some small issues I wasn't sure how to fix in Golden Axe, and I haven't given the other games a thorough playthrough yet, so I could have missed something.

Known differences/issues:
- The font on Golden Axe's menu screen is a brighter red than it should be. Not sure how to fix that.
- Death Adder has black eyes instead of yellow. Not sure how to fix that either.
- Death Adder Jr. and Death Bringer from Golden Axe have different palettes than their Genesis/Mega Drive counterparts.
- The first part of stage 4 in Golden Axe has had its palette altered, the area under the eagle's wing is a lighter blue than the Gen/MD version.
- The fade-in effect for the credits scene is blue, not black. This is a side effect of coloring the sky blue during the scene; I'm not sure how to keep the fade-in black.

Credits:
- EvilJagaGenius (me): Hacking
- PhoenixBound: identifying and disabling the brightening function
- endrift: mGBA emulator and its debugger
- VisualBoyAdvance-M devs: for their emulator and disassembler
- ROMHacking.net: Hosting this patch

ROM data:
- No-Intro name: Sega Smash Pack (USA).gba
- ROM size: 8,388,608 bytes
- CRC-32: 5C2E97BA

Enjoy!
-Jaga

eviljagagenius.blogspot.com

No-Intro name: Sega Smash Pack (USA).gba
ROM size: 8,388,608 bytes
CRC-32: 5C2E97BA