Donkey Kong Land: Donkey Kong Land: New Colors Mode

This is a GameBoy to GameBoy Color conversion for Donkey Kong Land. It also includes some new features: A Time Attack mode, level names from the manual displayed in the corner of the screen on the overworld, unused music restored, and quality of life updates: an icon now appears in the bottom right of the screen when you have a Kong in reserve, and you can change your Kong's palette. Some new features are accessed by pressing Select on the overworld. Please see the readme for more details.

Donkey Kong Land: New Colors Mode

v1.0 - Initial release

Features:
-Full color
-Time attack
-Level names from manual now displayed on overworld
-New menu, press Select on the overworld for:
*Level List: View Time Attack scores and a checklist of bonus rooms. World names from the manual are displayed here as well.
*Kong Palette: Change the palette of your playable characters.
*Speed Hack: Improves performance on some emulators, causes glitches in others.
-Icon when you have a Kong in reserve, like the other DKL games have.
-Animation added to the background starfish in the reef levels
-Unused songs restored:
*Balloon Barrage switched for unused Skyscraper theme
*K. Rool final boss theme switched for the unused boss theme

Recommended emulators (based on quick tests of a few levels):
Near-perfect:
-VBA (Supports speed hack)
-VBA-M (Does not support speed hack)
-3DS Virtual Console injection (supports speed hack in levels, a bit stuttery on overworld)
-GBE+ (Supports speed hack)
-PlayGuy (Supports speed hack)
Good:
-Gambatte (Does not support speed hack)
-BGB (Does not support speed hack)
-mGBA (Does not support speed hack)
Decent:
-Real hardware via flashcart (Does not support speed hack, hasn't been extensively tested)
-SameBoy (Does not support speed hack)

Known Errors:
System specific:
-Tile palette writes occasionally fail on real GBC hardware/SameBoy when scrolling both horizontally and vertically at the same time
-Occasional sprite corruption (an issue with the original game): does not happen on VBA/3DS

General:
-Occasional slowdown when a lot of entities are on-screen; Speed Hack usually eliminates it if your emulator supports it
-Screen does not turn white when you hit the level goal (changing palettes during this part was causing issues on certain platforms)
-Uncommonly, color writes fail at level start (usually a small line of 4-5 tiles), goes away when scrolling

Minor:
-First frame when loading a level doesn't display sprites (this is due to a lack of fade-in as GBC and GB handle screen turn off differently)



Database match: Donkey Kong Land (USA, Europe) (SGB Enhanced)
Database: No-Intro: Game Boy/Color (v. 20210227-015730)
File/ROM SHA-1: 4E6D8F085CA197479D59912C1D58E4F3B40C28AC
File/ROM CRC32: 49DC0D37