How do I make my imported backgrounds look better?

If the colors in your background translate poorly, resulting in lots of ugly greys and such, load your BMP into a photo editor and increase the saturation. The OHRRPGCE palette emphasizes high saturation colors, and lacks colored shades of grey.

If certain colors look out of place, try using the disable palette colors option to remove the offending colors, and then re-import the BMP.

You may also find it helpful to "dither" your pictures, or add "noise" to them. You may find that this creates the illusion of better color depth.

You can pre-process your backgrounds before importing them into the OHRRPGCE, which gives you complete control over how the screens will look when imported. This is done by using your paint program instead of the OHRRPGCE to convert your backgrounds to the OHRRPGCE palette.

First you need a version of the OHRRPGCE palette that your paint program can understand. There may be one in this zipfile. Install it so your paint program sees it.

Next, load your background. 'indexize' or 'quantize' the picture (what it is called depends on the program you use) -- tell it to use the 256 color ohrrpgce palette you just installed. You can use any custom conversion options in your paint program to play around with the output.

Convert your picture back to 24-bit. Adjust any colors you think were mismatched, remembering to only use colors from the OHRRPGCE palette, and save it. You can also make any other improvements, and can convert back to the OHRRPGCE pallete if you want to check the changes.

The picture is now in a form where you can import it into the OHRRPGCE and it will stay exactly the same as it looks now.