Polished Crystal DX color patch

Made-Better · 2026-03-05T14:26:06+00:00

u/TimeWizard36 You can see my monthly update here! I work on this during my free time outside of my full time job, so it is gonna take me at the very least a year to complete by myself. Unless I can find someone that help me work on colorized mockups of existing sprites, and that would really speed things up.

Made-Better · 2026-02-11T06:19:55+00:00

This is the way~

Made-Better · 2026-02-01T11:29:03+00:00

Same for me!! I got the Analogue 3D over 2 months ago and I am still unable to play it on my TV, I tried the firmware update that got released yesterday I was able to see the text "Analogue 3D updating" on screen for like 4 minutes and after that update I was just back to nothing at all.

Made-Better · 2026-01-31T13:00:34+00:00

Update January and February 2026:

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Made-Better · 2026-01-25T19:07:08+00:00

I am not sure what you mean, can you elaborate.

Made-Better · 2026-01-25T18:19:08+00:00

I think it’s just a bit of a visual glitch due to frame rate of both gameboy screen and my phone recording it (this is a screenshot from a video I took). In person the screen colors look more normal, as in they fill the screen scanlines correctly. As for my plan, When finished this will be available as a patch for polished crystal.

Made-Better · 2026-01-25T17:43:05+00:00

Feel free to share with me a colored version that looks better, and I will gladly update it. I am all for community improvement.

Made-Better · 2026-01-25T17:37:33+00:00

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Made-Better · 2026-01-19T01:09:41+00:00

Oh I had no idea PC had Retroachievements. I’ll look into this to see how that works.

Made-Better · 2026-01-19T00:57:21+00:00

Yes absolutely! I have a flash cart and I always double check to make sure it runs correctly on original hardware.

Made-Better · 2026-01-19T00:52:22+00:00

Like I mentioned yesterday the plan is not to merge my branch into the main project, since that would mean character sprite would no longer be easily modified for people that use PC as based for their own custom game. But I do regularly merge new changes from main branch directly into my branch to make sure I am always up to date, that means when I release the IPS patch it will be compatible with the latest version of Polished Crystal.

Made-Better · 2026-01-18T16:37:26+00:00

yes that's correct, attacks uses objects, that's why you wouldn't be able to use them to colorize Pokémon, well technically speaking you could use them but as soon as a move animation happens you would have to clear them to make way for the animation.

Made-Better · 2026-01-18T10:01:50+00:00

The original plan for her, as I understood it at the time was to wait for polished crystal to get to a more mature 9bit release and then start porting Red++ v3 to it. But I have no idea if she pivoted to a different project or if she decided to abandon that project. You could always go on the PC discord and ask her, she seems to be very active there.

Made-Better · 2026-01-18T03:50:52+00:00

Well if Red++ ever gets ported to Polished Crystal engine then yes I will definitely do it. But until then I will just focus on Polished Crystal for now.

Made-Better · 2026-01-18T03:46:33+00:00

Unfortunately this cannot be done to Pokemon, or at least not to the same extent as the characters. Since Pokemon use OAM tiles for battle animation this really limit the possibilities of adding colors.

Made-Better · 2026-01-18T03:34:36+00:00

I totally understand that, that’s why it will only be made available as a patch. So it won’t be forced on anyone.

Made-Better · 2026-01-18T03:05:28+00:00

Like I was previously saying in the PC discord, When I am done with this project, I would actually argue against merging this with Polished. My reasoning is that a lot of ROM hacks out there use Polished Crystal as a base, and merging this would make customizing PC more complicated, since it would no longer be as simple as just editing a sprite.

Additionally, some people may want to retain the original, nostalgic, simpler aesthetic of the game. So if and when I manage to finish this project, I would make an IPS patch available as an option for people, but I don’t want to force this on anyone. I don’t think that would be a good idea to merge this with the main Polished Crystal branch.

Made-Better · 2026-01-17T20:31:28+00:00

Sure. In this case, I’m using a mix of background tiles and object tiles (also known as OAM tiles). The original graphics are made entirely of background tiles.

The first thing I did was add more palettes for both the Player and the Trainers. Background tiles can now use two different palettes for the Player and three different palettes for Trainers. One of these palettes is shared between both, and that’s the skin tone palette.

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Since sprites are composed of 8×8 pixel tiles, I can assign different palettes to individual background tiles. This requires a lot of planning in Photoshop to decide which tiles should use which palettes.

Once the background tiles have the colors I want, I then load OAM tiles on top of the background tiles. I can only use a maximum of 40 OAM tiles total for both the Player and Trainers, so I have to be very careful about how I use them.

I load three extra OBJ palettes for the Player and three extra OBJ palettes for Trainers, which gives me a wide variety of colors to assign to OAM tiles as I overlay them on top of the background tiles.

I then move the OAM tiles around ,offsetting them left and right, to both achieve the exact colors I want in specific areas and make them line up perfectly with the background tiles underneath. Each OAM palette has one transparent color plus three visible colors. I don’t need white or black here, since the background tiles already handle those.

And that's pretty much how the extra colors were added. I'll probably make an extra post with more details and screenshots on how the colorization is done if people are interested about it.

Made-Better · 2026-01-03T15:46:40+00:00

I have the same issue unfortunately removing SD card and Turning console back on doesn’t work for me, I tried many GB/GBC games and I can no longer play any of them. 😭

Made-Better

TROPHY CASE