Author Topic: Completely removing background possibly in VBA-M soon  (Read 9629 times)

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Offline TerraEsperZ

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Completely removing background possibly in VBA-M soon
« on: October 18, 2008, 05:17:31 pm »
I just wanted to let other posters know that I've contacted Spacy51, one of the programmers working on VBA-M, which is basically an on-going work-in-progress dedicated to improving Visualboy Advance and integrating in it all the features from the various ports and versions of VBA.



I asked him about the possibility of including a way to completely remove the background to make it easier when taking screenshots to make maps. We recently determined that the default color that appears when a game doesn't actively displays anything is the first color in the background palette, which can be a problem if that happens to be pure black which is also often used in a game's graphics. Yeah, that infamous problem I've affectionately named "black-on-black removal problem".



Anyway, I don't know if such a feature might be implemented soon, but it didn't seem to be to much of a problem to him, and he mentioned that a hack could be worked out that would replace that background color with pure white (RGB #FFFFFF) which is outside of VBA's palette and thus, never used by a game, but which would only work if the Windows display is set to 24/32 bits color.



Anyway, I'll keep you guys informed of any development on this.



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Current projects: Metal Storm (NES), Clock Tower (SNES), Ristar-The Shooting Star (Gen), Sonic The Hedgehog (Gen), Sonic CD (Sega CD), Mega Man Zero (GBA), Battletoads (NES), Bucky O'Hare (NES)
Current project that are on hold because job burnout :
-Drill Dozer (GBA)
-Sonic 3D Blast (Genesis)
-Naya's Quest (PC)

Offline Grizzly

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RE: Completely removing background possibly in VBA-M soon
« Reply #1 on: October 19, 2008, 10:38:38 am »
Sounds good. Although I didn't have problems with the GBA/GBC games I mapped but it's better to be prepared for a game that uses the background colour in the foreground when it is an easy task to do.

Thanks for proposing that feature :)

Offline TerraEsperZ

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RE: Completely removing background possibly in VBA-M soon
« Reply #2 on: October 19, 2008, 01:14:22 pm »
I'm still hoping to finish those Metroid Fusion maps I started so many years ago, which I gave up on because of that problem. I know someone already posted theirs on VGMaps, but I'd like to do this one for myself.



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Current projects: Metal Storm (NES), Clock Tower (SNES), Ristar-The Shooting Star (Gen), Sonic The Hedgehog (Gen), Sonic CD (Sega CD), Mega Man Zero (GBA), Battletoads (NES), Bucky O'Hare (NES)
Current project that are on hold because job burnout :
-Drill Dozer (GBA)
-Sonic 3D Blast (Genesis)
-Naya's Quest (PC)

Offline TerraEsperZ

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RE: Completely removing background possibly in VBA-M soon
« Reply #3 on: October 27, 2008, 11:37:22 am »
And it's done!



http://vba-m.ngemu.com/vbam/vbacompiles/msvc2008/VisualBoyAdvance781.7z



Like all VBA-M release so far, it's unofficial and thus might contain various bugs due to continuing development. But you can now choose the background color by going in the Tools menu, then Palette Viewer, and clicking the "Change Backdrop Color" button.



Hopefully, this will be of use to some of you :)



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Current projects: Metal Storm (NES), Clock Tower (SNES), Ristar-The Shooting Star (Gen), Sonic The Hedgehog (Gen), Sonic CD (Sega CD), Mega Man Zero (GBA), Battletoads (NES), Bucky O'Hare (NES)
Current project that are on hold because job burnout :
-Drill Dozer (GBA)
-Sonic 3D Blast (Genesis)
-Naya's Quest (PC)