GIMP palette for Mario Kart DS emblems
01:30pm EST, 17 Nov 2005

I've been trying to come up with an emblem for my kart in Mario Kart DS. The icon editor in MKDS is surprisingly full-featured, but you only get 1024 pixels (32x32) in 15 colors plus transparency.

So, last night I sat down with GIMP 2.2 and Mario Kart DS, and came up with a palette that roughly matched the 15 colors of Mario Kart emblems (using the current DS screen; when they upgrade the DS next year, I think the screen will be a lot more saturated.) Here's the Mario Kart DS GIMP palette.

Right click and hit "save link as" or "save target as", and put it in the palettes directory in your GIMP folder (.gimp-2.2 is the name of mine, but it's probably different under Windows.)

To use the palette, shrink some image down to 32x32, and then select "Image/Mode/Indexed", select "custom palette", and pick "Mario Kart DS". I've had my best luck setting the dithering to "none". 32x32 is way too small to hide dithering noise. Then bring up the Palette window (Control-P) and tweak the emblem as needed using the 15 colors. Happy pixel painting.

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