Columns GG - original digitizer-format art

Cool stuff, thanks.

Now all left is the source :p

 

I've been doing a little examination of the file and I have determined part of its format. I'm not sure what those first $10 bytes stand for, and obviously the second $10 are a sort of "magic cookie" denoting this to be a Digitizer file (perhaps the first $10 are as well). The rest of the first $100 bytes are nulls. I have no idea what $102-$107 represent. $108 and $109 look to denote the width and height respectively (as the logo is indeed 160x64 pixels). Couple more null words and you have what seems like it might be the filename as it was on the original Digitzer media, which is padded with spaces through $11F. $120-$15F seem to be the pallet map - each entry consists of two words, the index and the actual color (not sure the exact format, looks like it might be a sort of extension to the Genesis 0BGR using all four bits instead of just three? need to look into this further). I took them and copied out just the color values:

0DDA 0FF8 0FB0 0F80 0F50 0D00 0800 0000 0AFF 00FF 00CF 009E 006C 003A 0007

In the game's title screen there are two pallet entries that are not used by the logo itself but only by the background and the "VERSUS" option. Also, $90 is the background color within the Digitzer file, so it appears that they used a nearly white color during creation (this wouldn't really matter as it's a separate pallet index, of course they could have used any color). This leaves 14 colors for the logo. The logo has five blues and seven colors with some red component (including two yellowish colors). Given this, I do believe the colors are 4-bit 0BGR. I grabbed a screenshot of Columns GG's title screen from the net, and here are the 8-bit RGB values for the logo, in no particular order (I'm not familiar with GG pallet formatting so bear with me if using the RGB triplets is a bit clunky):

0000FF 3030FF 6565FF 9999FF CECEFF DEDE00 DEDE89 DEAA00 CE7500 AA4400 891000 550000 FFFFFF 000000

They somewhat match up but there are some issues, as if the Digitizer file contains colors that the GG couldn't actually generate, and thus some of them were rounded. Also, there are three colors in the Digitizer file that don't seem to be directly mapped in the final game, as if there was a change made after the graphic's creation once converted to GG format - I've mapped them based on comparing this with the game, and they are denoted by an asterisk:

Code (Text):

1. 0000FF 3030FF 6565FF 9999FF CECEFF DEDE00 DEDE89 DEAA00 CE7500 AA4400 891000 550000 FFFFFF 000000
2.  0800*  0D00*  0F50   0F80   0FB0   00FF   0AFF   00CF   009E   006C   003A   0007   0FF8*  0000
3.  
4. *see below

The original file includes colors 0D00 and 0800 which would be 3/4 and 1/2 blue, respectively - the final graphic does not use this. Also, the closest color that might map to the white is the 0FF8, which is not white at all (it should be a light cyan). That coincidentally more or less matches up with the game's title screen background color. The image of course starts at $160. Looking at the raw file in Tile Molester (16bpp, 2-dimensional gives a recognizeable image although it's interpreting the pallet indices as raw color values so it will have either a reddish or bluish tint depending on whether you use 16bpp RGB or BGR), however, it appears that the logo's border was 0FF8 originally.

0D00 is index 95 and 0800 is index 96. Searching through the binary, the first occurrance of 0095 is at 11B4. Going back to TM, this appears to be the second blue in the gradient, from top to bottom (which would map this color to 3030FF). Doing the same thing with 0096 brings us to 2C0, which predictably is mapped to 0000FF.

The Digitizer file also includes a trademark symbol in the upper right that was not used ingame. It uses 97 for the outline and 99 for the interior.

Based on this, I have taken the logo from the GG title screen and mapped it to the colors from the Digitizer file (top is ingame, bottom is remapped), and incorporated the trademark symbol in the corner:

 

Hmm... Perhaps they just tweaked the colors later, because of the bluish tint in the GameGear's LCD?

That would be similar to GBA devs brightening the colors, for the old non-backlit systems.