It's just the SNES RGB format. Each of the 8 palettes there is actually just modifying one palette (palette 0, colors 2-7), and each of the 8 "rows" are an animation (used for fading Bowser when he flies in/out of the screen).
If you're not familiar with the SNES RGB format, each color uses two bytes; when converted to binary, they have the format [-bbbbbgg gggrrrrr], where the r, g, and b bits correspond to the red, green, and blue color components. Of course, that's kinda annoying to manually calculate, so there's a few ways to get them:
- In Lunar Magic by hovering over a color in the palette editor and looking down at the color information below the palettes.
- Using the color converter in SNEStuff.
- Using this online tool I made a while back.
As for modifying it, note that the SNES works in
little endian. This means that, for 16-bit (or longer) values, their bytes are written in reverse; that is, $aabb is written as $bb,$aa. So, for instance, here's how the first Bowser palette looks in the ROM:
Codeorg $00B69E
db $FF,$7F,$C0,$18,$FB,$63,$0C,$03
db $0B,$02,$35,$15,$5F,$1A
The first color here is actually $7FFF, but in little endian, it ends up as $FF,$7F. To fix this, you can reformat the palette like this:
Codeorg $00B69E
dw $7FFF,$18C0,$63FB,$030C
dw $020B,$1535,$1A5F
When patched, this will assemble the same as the other table, but you don't need to keep track of the endian.
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