I said I was going to make a tutorial, so now I am.

This is the process that I use if I need a background that uses two palettes. Right now, the editor only supports one palette through the background editor. But, this can be worked around by finding the locations of the background’s files and using the editor’s built-in 2D Texture Editor to edit them as it they are just tilesets or textures. This is the basic, put-together-in-half-an-hour guide:



Everything you need is in these two folders. For each image, there is a corresponding palette file that shares a similar name. Example:

d_2d_I_M_back_demo_castle_ncg.bin – Image File
d_2d_I_M_back_demo_castle_ncl.bin – Palette File

These particular files make up the background for the Title Screen, which isn’t editable through the standard background editor, but is easy to do through this method. All the other background files in the game are in the same directory.

Now, there are three classifications for the files in these folders that are determined by a key word:

free – The Top Layer of a Background
back – The Bottom Layer of a Background
tikei – A Tileset

So if you select an image file and the correct palette file, you’ll be able to view the background in the 2D Texture Editor, like this:



Everything from here on in is fairly self-explanatory. Once you find your background of choice, click “Export all bitmaps with all palettes”, and edit your background externally with any image editor. As usual, I recommend GIMP. When you’re done, click “Import all bitmaps with all palettes”, import your modified background and save your work.

You can use this method to produce a different variety of effects with your backgrounds- not just palette swapping! You can have different segments of a single background divided between two palettes to ensure a minimum loss of detail and color! If you do this, all you have to do afterwards is re-tile the background through the background editor.

I can make a more detailed tutorial, but for now I think this will suffice. In fact, I'm certain that any unanswered questions can probably be answered by reading through tutorial How to do multi-palette tilesets!. It's a transferable process.

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