Palette Hacks

written by Chuckie, mirrored it here as it is a very good guide.

Ok.  Here is a quick guide* on using palette hacks:
So, palette hacks are how we can get texture changes in real time.  However, their addy locations change depending on what arena you are playing in and what wrestler you are using.
In order to figure out where these palette addys are located at any time, we can use what are known as pointers.

Pointers are just the name of a specific addy that "points" to where a specific group of addys are located.
People have found a lot of these pointer addys in the past:

The pointers for arena objects (ringmat, barricades, crowd, etc.) can be found here:
https://gexhex.forumotion.com/t42-arenas-poly-location

The pointers for weapons can be found here:
http://users.boardnation.com/~jamstubbs/index.php?board=34;action=display;threadid=318

and the pointers for wrestlers can be found here:
http://nextwave-64.online/forum/showthread.php?tid=7819

Now, for actually changing the palette.
If we are trying to create The Rock's removable elbow pad, go to the OSR link for the wrestler pointers.
There should be a tutorial that WldFb made a while ago for wrestler polygon hacking.
Hacking the wrestler polygon shape like he did is closely related to changing the palette.
If you scroll down to the end of the first post in the tutorial, there should be a list of addys for each individual body part for player 1.

I believe the offset for the other players is +5B0.
If we are going to take off the Rock's elbow pad, we need to change the palette for both the upper and lower portions of his right arm.
So, we will start with the upper part of the arm.
From his tutorial, we see that player 1's upper right arm has a pointer addy of 800A5970.
In No Mercy, we need to start a match.  For this example, I am going to select a single match in the Survivor Series arena with The Rock's 1st attire as player 1.
Once in match, I go to the pointer addy in the memory editor.



So, with this pointer, there are in fact multiple addys displayed around it.
I believe the first pointer controls the polygon shape, which is what WldFb did in his tutorial.
However, the 2nd addy displayed should control the palettes.
The 2nd addy listed controls the palette for the wrestlers but I believe the 3rd addy listed controls the palette for the arena parts and weapons.
These addys seem to change depending on what wrestler, arena, and cheat codes are currently being used.  For my example here, the 2nd addy listed is 80222248.  If I go to that location in the memory editor, it should look like this:



Now once we go there, we should be near the area that changes the palette of that body part.
Sometimes I need to play around with the addys in this area to figure out exactly which one causes the change.

Usually for me, the addy that I need to change is +63 from that addy.  So here it would be 802222AB.
If I change that byte from 00 to 01, then it will cause the palette change.



Now with the elbow pad code that I made before, it followed a pattern that looked like this:
When player 1 is The Rock...
...and when player 1 is attire 1...
...and when player 1 is performing The People's Elbow animation...
...and when player 1 is on the frame of the animation where he takes off his elbow pad...
...then an unused activator that was previously set to 0000 is now set to 0001.

This unused activator is used because sometimes a match will go backstage and the palette location will change.  So, the unused activator will stay activated during a match no matter where you are at and change the corresponding addy.  When the match resets, the activator changes back to 0000.
From there, you would use the activator to change the palette:
When unused activator is changed to 0001...
...and when arena is Survivor Series ringside area...
...then palette change occurs.
You then repeat that code for the backstage areas and their specific palette addys.  To reset the texture, you would use a code that looks something like this:
When match time is 0 minutes...
...and when match time is 0 seconds...
...then unused activator is reset back to 0000.

So, that takes care of the upper arm and then the same thing needs to be done with the lower arm texture.  The same unused activator can be used for it too.  Just use different unused activators for the other players.
The only thing that you might need to worry about when you are working with these palette addys is that some cheat codes and ROM hacks might change the location of the palettes.

*A "quick" guide by chuckie is better than long guides most people write.