Editing level palettes without SonLVL

Hello there, recently I learned some things about palettes to create Nighttime Angel Island Zone, and one of them is how a palette file works. SonLVL is a great tool for editing palettes and other things, but sometimes you may want to use a hex editor, for editing an palette quickly, or even mobile modding. This tutorial won't explain how to load a palette file, just how to understand them in a hex editor.

In a palette file, you will notice there are 32 bytes for an full 16 color palette. Each color can have 3 values, Red, Green and Blue. There are 2 bytes for each color, and they work like this:

0 is not used as far as I know, and B, G and R are Blue, Green and Red. However, you can only use the values 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, A, C and E. 0 is the most dark value and E is the most bright.

Usually an level palette has 6 lines (3 full palettes), top is objects (rings, monitors, enemies), middle is foreground and bottom is background, but tiles may use any of the 3 palettes so they aren't exclusive to that layer.

You probably understand how they work now, so here's color examples as an guide (specially for mobile modders). Not every color is shown (the Mega Drive/Genesis has 512 of them!), so go experiment to figure out the rest!

Brightness examples:

0E EE - White

00 00 - Black

08 88 - Gray

Color examples:

0E 00 - Blue

0E E0 - Cyan

00 E0 - Green

00 EE - Yellow

00 0E - Red

0E 0E - Purple

Hope this helps. In a later date I will explain Cycle palettes.