Four years, three complete restarts and a database of more than 2,000 tilesets later, the most ambitious Game Boy colourisation project in the scene has hit the milestone that matters: Donkey Kong DX, marc_max’s full-colour remaster of 1994’s Donkey Kong ’94, can now be played from start to finish.
The update landed on marc_max’s Patreon over the weekend: he has “assembled the very first beta build of Donkey Kong DX that can be played from start to finish without seeing a single uncoloured pixel.” For a colourisation hack — where the hard part is never a single screen but covering every screen at once — that’s the threshold moment. The heavy engineering is behind the team; what remains is testing and polish.
It has been a long road. marc_max started the project a month after releasing Mega Man World 5 DX, a two-year hack he published on Christmas Eve, and found Donkey Kong ’94 in a different league entirely. The game’s graphics live in a database of over 2,000 tilesets — compressed and uncompressed data scattered across the ROM — which took weeks of study before he disassembled it wholesale. Then there’s the Game Boy Color’s eight-background-palette limit (palettes that work in one forest stage can fail in the next), 16KB ROM banks threatening to overflow, and graphics that had to be redrawn, recompressed and reinjected. No surprise the project went through three full resets. He’s joined by graphic artists Kensu and Jorge, whose tile work he calls the most beautiful way to play the game.
A beta is not a release, though. marc_max plans a full playthrough run to catch issues and wants palette adjustments for artistic consistency across the game’s 100+ stages — “don’t go bananas just yet,” as Time Extension put it. But the target is real: there are high hopes players will be enjoying Donkey Kong DX this holiday.
Notably, this is a farewell. marc_max calls Donkey Kong DX his last Game Boy colourisation remaster, closing a run that began with 2019’s Dr. Mario DX proof of concept. He’s been hired for a commercial colourisation of a well-known classic — details under wraps — and is laying the foundations for an original game for a classic console, possibly via Kickstarter.
The 1994 original, co-developed by Nintendo EAD and Pax Softnica, was a puzzle-platformer marvel overshadowed in its own release year by Donkey Kong Country. Four years of reverse-engineering later, it’s finally about to get the colour treatment it always deserved.
Sources: Time Extension (interview), Time Extension, The Daily Game News