Permanent palette changes in Raizing games?

[Moniker]

On account of the diverse selection of fighters in Raizing shmups, I'm often tempted to try and change the palette of enemy bullets so everything remains nice and distinct. Isn't really a problem in Garegga since player shots aren't so over the top, but in Bakraid and Batrider it's sometimes hard to see enemy bullets coming at you through your flamethrower, or have the screen sorta wiped with yellow primary fire, causing you to miss the little yellow circular shots.

Problem being, it's an immense pain in the ass to change them every run, and it's really easy to get distracted and miss when you're trying to tweak colors. Further, save states plain old don't work for me running Bakraid in Shmupmame, and they tend to get more and more corrupted to the point of unplayability in Batrider.

Anyone familiar with a way to permanently alter those values? Maybe using MAME itself?

[Iori Branford]

My own experience is sadly a bit limited for a detailed how-to.

I would first watch the palette memory while playing, in order to find the location of the ROM that has the in-game palette colors. If they're found, I can think of two methods, ranked in order of what my personal preference would be.

1. MAME cheat that watches the palette for the in-game colors, and then overwrites them with your colors. I regret that the cheat system documentation is rather sparse, but a starting point is http://www.mamecheat.co.uk/

2. ROM hack. Using hex or text editor, replace the palette values in the ROM with your desired values. The ROMs will then fail the integrity check and will need to be run with an emulator that can bypass that check.

[Vexorg]

Doesn't Bakraid already have an in-game method to change bullet color? Can't remember what it was right offhand, but I believe it was some combination of C button plus a direction on the stick.

[ptoing]

Alternate bullet colors:
Hold C and press Down during game play to change the destructible bullet color. Hold C and press Right during game play to change the normal bullet color. Hold C and press Left during game play to change the special bullet color.

[Moniker]

Doesn't Bakraid already have an in-game method to change bullet color? Can't remember what it was right offhand, but I believe it was some combination of C button plus a direction on the stick.

Yeah, they both do. But the changes reset each run.

@Iori - Thanks. I've done a bit of romhacking before so if I get motivated enough I may give it a shot.

[Ixmucane2]

2. ROM hack. Using hex or text editor, replace the palette values in the ROM with your desired values. The ROMs will then fail the integrity check and will need to be run with an emulator that can bypass that check.

A custom version of MAME that supports the hacked ROM and its different checksum as a separate game should be easy to make and even easier to maintain, since the changes would consist of a list of ROM files and an additional game entry (copy & paste FTW), without touching the emulation itself.
If you are skilled enough to hack ROM content, you can certainly modify and compile MAME.

[Ex-Cyber]

IIRC, a failing ROM hash becomes a non-fatal error if you launch with a game name on the command line.

You might also try using the cheat engine to simply patch whatever RAM the game uses for the internal palette editor.