Palmod

Palmodding
Palmod is a program that allows the editing of character colors for fighting games. It was initially developed for Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, but you can use it for many other fighting games these days. You can even use its "Extras" file support as well as the developer "Unknown Game" mode to add support for new palettes or games.

Installation
For mvsc you need PalMod, which you can download from http://zachd.com/palmod. (The very old, limited, and out of date 2008 version can be found   here.)

After download create a new folder and call it whatever you want for example "palmod" and unzip the Palmod mvsc.zip in it. For organizing reasons make 2 folders inside there: "mvsc" and "ACTs". Create a copy of your mvsc rom and paste it inside the "mvsc" folder we just created, then unzip it inside there. You will find a lot of files, but we only need one. If you're using the 1/12/1998 version of MvC, you will be using "mvc.06". If you're using the 1/23/1998 version of MvC, you will be using "mvc.06a". (There's also a 1/23/1998 US version that uses "mvcu.06", but typically you wouldn't use that.) For the sake of simplicity, we'll refer to your 06 ROM, which is either mvc.06, mvc.06a, or mvcu.06, as "mvc.06" - just know that the precise filename isn't really important. What is important is that PalMod recognizes it and that you can see reasonable previews in PalMod. Now copy that "mvc.06" to the root Palmod folder we created first.

Now open palmod, and from the top select "file" then "load file" and go to your Palmod folder, at first you will not see the file, you will need to change this "SFIII3 51 Rom" tab to "MVC Arcade (mvc*.06*)" then open the file that you have in the palmod folder.



You can also directly get to the MVC Arcade load option by selecting:

From there you should see Captain America pop up in PalMod's Preview window. If that happened then you correctly set it all up. Now let's do a rundown of the features in Palmod and how to use them.

Creating a Palmod
After setting up Palmod you will be welcomed with this screen


 * 1 - Preview for the current palette.
 * 2 - Colors for current palette.
 * 3 - RGB values for the current selected color (Red/Green/Blue).
 * 4 - Current Character/Current Palette that's being edited.
 * 5 - Toolbar

Now let's try editing a palette. Currently you should be on the Captain America main P1 palette which can be selected with light punch. Now select any color from the current palette and click the "Blink" button. You should see some parts of the preview light up for a second then go back to normal: this button can be used if you don't know what part of the palette you are editing. You can select any color then click the "Blink" button and it will blink the part that color goes in. You are free to edit other colors you would want to edit. After you have created your desired palette, go to the tool bar and select "Tools" and then click on "Save Palette" then open the ACTs folder we created previously, and name it any name you want, by doing this you save your palette for later if you want to load it and edit it again. You can also save out your modifications to an indexed PNGs. Indexed PNGs are image files that also contain discrete color tables that PalMod and other tools can read to "copy" those colors from the image. To do this, go to File :: Export Image in PalMod: Then in the Export Image preview, you will see this. Then go to File :: Save Image and export that image as Indexed PNG:

That will produce something like this next image. You can drag and drop these indexed PNG images onto PalMod, and PalMod will read the colors from it and use them. It's a great way to store and share your palettes with others. Note: the wiki stores images as WebP images: PalMod cannot use those. But the PalMod Gallery on the PalMod site has a bunch of indexed PNG images you can borrow to use with MvC. Now when you made sure everything is fine and you have your desired palette, go to the tool bar again and select "File" then click on "Patch Changes". Once you do that, your mvc.06 file you selected at the start has been modified with the new palette.

Now how can you use the new palette?

Using your pallete
Remember the mvsc folder we created before? Copy your modified mvc.06 file and go to the mvsc folder, and replace the mvc.06 file in there with your new modified one. Then zip all the files in there again into a mvsc.zip rom file. Now copy the newly zipped mvsc.zip and go to your fightcade roms folder. From there replace your current rom with your new modified one. Now open fightcade. Go to Marvel vs Capcom Clash of Super Heroes and type /play (or press Test Game) to test out the game in offline mode. It will prompt a error but don't worry that's because you modified parts of the rom. Just press ok and the game should start normally. Now if you select your new character with the palette your created (which was Captain America light punch in this example) you should see your newly edited and modified palette. Just know that in online the opponent can't see your palmod neither can you see his palmod if he has one but you can freely see them during games of any kind. And from here you have made your first palmod, and now you can edit any other character/palette you would want to edit. Here's some resources that can help you a bit with palmodding:

The MVSC1 discord server Where you can share palmods/discuss them for mvsc and also discuss the game

Palmod Gallery discord server Where you can share palmods for mvsc and also alot of other Fightcade games

A Comprehensive guide to Palmodding Is directed at Jojo HFTF but has a lot of tips for palmodding and can be helpful