The first thing you need to do when you create a new game is to decide whether you want to use 8-bit (palette-based) colour or 16-bit (hi-colour). If you want to use 16-bit colour, you can still use 256-colour backgrounds and sprites if you want to, but the engine will only run in a 16-bit colour resolution, thus slowing it down.

If you want to use 8-bit (because it runs faster), you need to set up the palette. This is because all sprite and background scene imports rely on the palette setup to be the same. You CANNOT use hi-colour sprites or backgrounds in a 256-colour game.

You set your chosen colour depth by opening the General Settings pane and adjusting the Colour Depth setting near the top of the list.

Now, choose the "Colours" pane. Here you will see the 256-colour palette displayed in a grid. Most of the slots are marked "X" - these are the slots reserved for the background pictures, and will be different in each room. The other colours will be as they look here for the entire game. These fixed colours allow things like the main character graphics, which must be displayed on more than one screen, to work.

If you want, you can assign more or less colours to the backgrounds. To toggle the background assignment on/off, click on the slot, then check the "This colour is room-dependant" box to swap the slot's status.

IMPORTANT NOTE: You must set up the palette as you want it before you start making your game - if you change it later, you will have to re-import all the sprites and background scenes.

You can select multiple colour slots by clicking on the first slot, then shift-clicking on the last slot in the range you want to select. You can then toggle the background status of all the selected slots at once.

You can right-click in the palette grid to export the entire palette to a .PAL or PCX file which you can then use to read back into the Editor in a different game. If you choose to export to a pcx file, then a screen shot of the Palette Editor will be saved as the picture. This way you can see all the game-wide colours in the file.

The "Replace palette" option replaces the palette entries with those entries from the PAL or PCX file you choose. It can read standard 768-byte PAL files, SCI palette resources (renamed to extension .pal) and JASC PSP palette files.