This page describes how YY-CHR handles color palettes.
YY-CHR has two ways of reading and storing palettes & colors—PAL files and DAT files.
These files are marked with a ".pal" extension, but they can have any extension. In fact, YY-CHR will load any file and display the values within as colors. It interprets each 8-bit byte as a color value in a RGB triple, and the whole file as one long RGB triple list—no header, no delimiters. YY-CHR shows at least X colors in a palette. If there is not enough data to fill the palette, extra spots are filled in as (0,0,0).
These files are lists of colors. Instead of each byte being a part of an RGB triple, each byte is a color value from the currently loaded palette. These files typically have a ".dat" extension but can have any filename. Additionally YY-CHR will read any file as a list of palette colors, as this file format has no header nor delimiters.
Despite DAT files being the way to store subpalette information in YY-CHR, they do not encode subpalette sizes. To apply subpalettes properly to CHR previews, palette size must be set by using the X dropdown.
There are three sections in the program that deal with palettes and colors: The Character ROM Image Format Drop-down on the Navigation Panel, the PAL and SET areas of the Editor Panel, and the Palette Menu on the Menu bar.
By changing the CHR format you change the subpalette size for preview. If you look at Fig. No.1 below, you can see a subpalette size of four. In Figure No.2, a size of sixteen.
These areas show the RGB palette and, optionally, the Palette Table, allow you to choose subpalettes to apply to the CHR preview, and makes it easy to edit the palettes.
Figure No.1
Figure No.2
todo
