Game Boy Color Bootstrap ROM
Developer: Nintendo Publisher: Nintendo Released in JP: October 21, 1998 Released in US: November 18, 1998 Released in EU: November 23, 1998 Released in AU: February 3, 1999 This game has unused graphics. This game has a notes page

The Game Boy Color (abbreviated GBC or CGB), launched in 1998, is often considered to be the successor to the original Game Boy, although it's technically more of an upgraded model of the Game Boy—even counted as such by Nintendo. The GBC uses the same Z80-based 8-bit CPU as the original Game Boy, but with a higher clock speed, expanded RAM, and most obviously, COLOR.

The Game Boy's early competitors, the Game Gear and Lynx, offered color, but fell in the wake of its huge battery life and library. Ironically, this new Game Boy pushed later competitors, from Bandai and SNK, to push "Color" upgrades of their WonderSwan and Neo Geo Pocket, respectively.

The Game Boy Color Bootstrap ROM (often mistakenly called a BIOS although it is not a system for handling basic in- or output) is executed when the GBC is turned on. Just like the GB bootstrap ROM, it checks the inserted game cartridge for integrity by calculating the complement checksum, locking out cartridges that may be corrupted or which don't have the copyrighted Nintendo logo within.

Unused Palette Configurations

See also: Used Palette Configurations

The ROM assigns color palettes to certain monochrome Game Boy games. It does so by computing a hash for every Nintendo Licensee game and checking it against an internal database of hashes. However, a big chunk of color table actually went unused: only 94 hashes are on record, which only use 45 different palette configurations out of 174 possible configurations—of which 146 are unique! Minus the six unique colors the GBC lets the user select manually (from 12, total) and the 45 associated with games, this makes for a whopping 95 palette configurations that are never used!

To access the unused palettes using an emulator that allows the bootstrap ROM to load, use the Gameshark code 01??08D0 with the ID of the desired entry. The selected palette will load regardless of whether or not buttons have been pressed.

There are a total of 123 palette configurations in here, 15 of which are duplicates of Assigned Palette Configurations (games with hardcoded default palettes on Game Boy Color) and 13 of which are duplicates within this table. These duplicate are marked with their respective original entry in small script.