The VG Resource

In the OAM viewer for VisualBoyAdvanced, is there any way to possibly change the black background places that the sprites are viewed on into another color?

I'm ripping a game with several black areas in the sprites and doing this would save me alot of time

Ah thanks, I appreciate it. Sorry I didn't search the forums first

it's okay, that thread is would be easy to miss without knowing what to look for. in fact, I stickied it in the GBA rip forum since I don't want to lose that information myself.

It seems that the method you showed me just changes the BG in-game, I was actually just looking for a way to edit it in the OAM viewer, like this area:

oh I figured it would work, huh... well, I'll see if Previous knows, sorry. :s

Nah I appreciate the help, I could use that bit of info you already posted as well later on thank you :y

I found a method but it's a bit time consuming. Basically you make a savestate of an area, decompress it (add .gz + extract it with WinRAR or something), and opening it in Tile Molester (or anything capable of viewing and editing 15bpp) or PSPad (or any hex editor). The offset for the palette is 81DF.

Tile Molester -> Basically you bring the number of columns down to 2 and use the line tool to make the first column in the palette to one color (255,0,255), then save.

PSPad -> If you understand hex editing then you should be able to figure this out. FF00FF = 255,0,255

Then load the savestate up and the OAM should display with the altered palette. If you're doing this for something with a flashing palette, this won't work since it'll to the original quickly.

I'll give that a shot, thanks!

Well, this, though for sprites you'll want 05000200 to 050003E0 as those are the sprite palettes' addresses;
these change the sprite's alpha colour (palette index 0 of each 16 colour ramp) to some odd blue (you can replace 5AA2 with something else to get some other colour).
They affect both the scene and the OAM viewer (you'll have to [Refresh] though) and map and tile and everything because they change the actually used palettes.

If it does not work, then the black used by the sprites is not palette index 0 (alpha). In that case, a look at this may help you - it's written for DeSmuME but applies to VBA as well, except there are no sub screen palettes. It's not exactly working towards what you want to do, but covers the information you need.