This week marks another DKDX milestone: the HUD.
For the first time in my DX hacks, I'm using the scanline palette swap trick (thanks to Tobias and xenophile for their valuable help).
This was a common technique used in a lot of consoles back in the day. Basically, it allowed to do cool things like using more colors on screen (with some caveats) than the allowed ones. Its implementation its quite easy (though it can become harder when hacking an existing game).Long story short: after the LCD screen has rendered a scanline, you can inject some very short code that will be ran before the next scanline starts rendering. This was used in a lot of GBC games to colorize the HUD with their own palettes and without wasting any of the available stage palettes.So... in DKDX we've got now a HUD without any of the glitches that had been seen previously in other clips or screenshots: the lives counter shows up correctly! Not only that, but this frees a BG palette in most of the DK boss battle stages, which will be helpful.
You can see it in action in the video. Graphics are from Kensu.While recording it, I noticed a new bug: when I picked up the platform placer, I realized the palettes for Pauline items and the key were not getting lighter. That's because of the scanline trick implementation. And that's also the proof that hacking and colorizing a game is a constant fight of adding things and fixing new bugs that appear, specially with complex games like DK :-(
Anyway... got more news today!
I still need to sign the contract, but I will be probably colorizing a commercial game. I can't give you more details, obviously, but you will probably know about it during the following months.This means, I am going to focus on it once I sign the contract and that I'll reduce the time spent on DK and MMW3/4 temporarily (two or three months likely).
In the coming days, I am going to focus on DKDX trailer (that will be released later this month). Then, I'll start working on the commercial colorization.
But do not worry, I will keep posting here as I am not stopping working on the rest of hacks! Indeed, out of all them, MMW3DX is the closest release and that one will be my priority now.
As always, thank you everyone for your support and your patience :-)