Hiya I've been away for a bit been busy and stuff but thought i'd try and give this a go again (graphics hacking that is) i'm trying to hack super mario kart (snes) but i notice, say for example i change koopas head to blue it comes out black/brown when i run it on the emulator?? I've worked out some colours and how they come out on the emulator but it's quite confusing. i am definitely still a newbie and DO NOT understand the hex side of hacking hardly at all yet but help on this would be cool. i've looked for documents but found nothing that i understood. thanks! 

sorry if i don't make sense, i'm obviously just stupid! but hey  :beer:

Ha ha! I found that out when playing around with Zelda: A Link to the Past... It's how I managed to make Link's hair yellow! XD (Actually, you make OoT Link by only swapping some "colors").

Basically, the tile viewer shows you a sort of a default palette, like a, um... heat sensor? Basically, the viewer cannot call the palette that you're viewing so you're stuck seeing black/green/blue/white or whatever (that would be the case, at least, when hacking GB/C and NES games).
Let me explain in pictures...

Let see, in game you see this guy: but the tile viewer shows you this guy: (NOTE: this was not taken from a tile viewer, but it gets the point across, I think). That's how you're seeing it without the sprite's normal colors.

If you don't want to mess around with any palette changers or anything and if the color you want to change to is already in the palette, you can just use to recolor the sprite... Like...

Let's say you wanna give the koopa green eyes and gloves, so you get the green that at his feet . In the viewer, that green may look red, purple, green, whatever, so you'll have to remember where they are. Anyway, figure out what color is used there and draw it on top of its hands and stuff to get this: . You didn't have to use any palette things.

Think of Tile Editors like one of those "paint by numbers" paint sets for kids. All they do is rearrange the numbers in the graphic but the colors for each number stays the same.

If you want to hack the actual colors that are used you are going to need to hack the palette inside the ROM.

thanks guys! I'll give it another go, TileMolestro better than tile layer pro because the colours are easier to edit and distinguish...mmmmmm.... :thumbsup: