Hi, I know little about making background, I may need some help as even with tutorial there some little thing I don't get

So it started when I wanted to use some VHS cover as background for my mod. I made my first mistake replacing the toad house bottom bg, as I thought I didn't care about toads house. Problem is it is a scrolling BG as this bottom bg are clouds. It wasn't that much of a problem but something I don't get is that you need to import 512x512 even considering the DS scrreen resolution is lower, so naturally most of the image is croped out of the screen.

And I wanted to know if that problem is exclusive to autoscrolling bottoms or if the crop is for every bg. I don't get why I'm forced to import 512x512 bg if I will have to recrop it into the tilemap eventually.

What are your advices, how to make bg good looking, is there steps I missed ? Thank in advance.

Well, if I'm right, all DS images (tile graphics, sprites, textures (my cup of tea as a SM64DS hacker) and BGs) can have only 256 colours. Try to simplify the colour palette in Paint (yes, Paint! For pixel art it doesn't suck) using the eyedropper and a 1-px pencil. Backgrounds having to be 512×512 is probably both technical limitations and accounting for scrolling. Plus, zoom sprite.

EDIT: Oh yeah, found this: BG Editing How-To.