SEE POST#3 below for solution

I am a little stumped here. I have attempted to modify the cursor for the main menu, but the arrow.grp seems to use the mirrored palette of the background.pcx? index 1 = index 256, 2 = 255, 3 = 254, etc.

Here's a picture showing what I am describing. you can open it and see how the palette indexes are mirrored. Now what?


Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Feb 17 2009, 9:30 am by bajadulce.

At some point of the main menu does the cursor change back to normal? or appears as it should be?

Cause I've faced something like this before in which in only some parts the cursor will mess up. And that's because it uses different palletes on almost everyplace like on hover smks, on hover the "select sc or bw" screen and such. I just went "omg this cursor.grp is the same so I'll just rename it to match the others".

If that's not the case, try inverting the colors in the bitmap? lol.
Should be something funny to test out.

EDIT: SOLVED.. please delete and lock this thread! Do it now! ... j/k. That really annoys me about help threads and is pretty shallow thinking.

Your joke to "invert" the .bmp colors woke me up in the middle of the night with a solution. Here are the steps I took to reverse the palette colors. Call me a fool, but it worked and I now have the sweetest cursor ever!

Basically we are going to capture the .grp ingame with its reversed colors and then paste our screenshot back onto the original palette.

1. decompile the arrow.grp with the corresponding background palette for that screen. i.e. palmm\backgrnd.pcx etc. The decompiled cursor will look funny because the palette is reversed, but don't worry about it.
2. Copy/paste YOUR image onto one of these "reversed" frames and change the transparent background color from the 256 index color to the #1 color so as to not crash the game.
3. Compile your .grp with this reversed setup.
4. Let's modify our backgnd.pcx, so that it is of a solid color. This will serve as a clean monotone background for our snapshot.
5. capture a screenshot of your cursor in a clean area of screen.
8. You now have your cursor in the reversed colors and can copy/paste it back onto those "backward" decompiled .bmps. Your picture should look the same goofy way it did ingame. It is a screenshot after all!
9. fix the background transparent color if you need to etc. and recompile.

EDIT 2:
OR USE MSPAINT's INVERT COLOR FEATURE...
1. decompile your .grp with the palette to the corresponding .pcx
2. use mspaint and the invert color feature to flip your colors. Save .bmp and repeat.
3. compile.. presto.

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Feb 17 2009, 4:52 pm by bajadulce. Reason: added the 2nd half.

I think it is just that the palette in those pcx files is reversed. I've noticed this before when looking around at palettes. After you've extracted the palette, you just need to reverse the order of the entries somehow.

According to Farty, using Invert Colors in paint on a palleted BMP does this.

Ahhh.. good ole paint! I rarely use this program, but there you go. I just confirmed that works. Tho I have to give my solution of recapturing the reversed image ingame and then recopy/pasting it over the original palette some kind of merit for at least finding a solution. well except for animated images, this would kinda suck.

Ok, so we now know how to flip the colors of the image, but is there a way to flip the palette too w/ mspaint or other program? The flipped color feature works great, but what about animated frames. One would have to do that for each and every one?

I can't believe it actually worked

jeez, I never realized how many different arrow.grp there were. ... zzzzzz

Anyways, just a quick update of what I am experiencing modifying all of these cursors. After flipping the colors of my image in mspaint. I must then rectify the transparent background as it appears to be NOT flipped at least in the steps I am doing to build these.

Does anyone recall whether Gundam Century modifies ALL of its cursors or just the palmm and ingame one? The GC cursor is animated as you know. I just wonder how he managed that seeing how just one frame is a pain in the ass. I might peek over at that data real quick as I am now very curious as to how many he modified.