Png2Scorpion

To get way more colors in Amiga games you can use the copper to change the palette vertically (called slices).  For this example I'll use an OCS 16 color screen (4 bitplanes) to display a scrolling level with 94 colors plus sprites.  You can use this for any bitplane mode but I think 4 bitplanes gives the most bang for the buck.

1) go to https://www.png2amiga.app/ click the image at the top left to load your own image, for this example I took a screenshot of the beautiful PS1 game Adventures of Lomax that originally had 256 colors, you can download the original image at the top of this tutorial by clicking on the little Pop-out box at the top right of the image and then clicking the Download button at the top left

2) for output on png2amiga choose Amiga OCS (12 bit), lores, depth 4, dither none, sliced palette, best and then scroll down to "Advanced" at the bottom uncheck Reserve Color 0 for black and under Slice Changes/Line put 1 (this is how many colors it will change per vertical line, if you leave it at 0 it will do the max and give you the most colors, you can also do 2,3,4 etc up to 15 I think I just wanted to start with the simplest, the 16 color levels in Lionheart do just 1 color change per line for example)

3) this gives you a 320x240 level with 94 colors and 15 left for sprites so 107 colors on a "16 color" screen (obviously for a real game you would make the level longer and not have the enemies or player included when doing the graphic conversion), if you want to reserve some of the palette for enemies only you can reserve specific palette entries in png2amiga under Advanced

4) start a new project in Scorpion, I called mine lomax, set Amiga OCS trackdisk, 4 bp, 16 colors, a500 emulation settings

5) in png2amiga scroll down to below Adjustments where it shows iff with a down arrow, click on that to download the image as an iff, it will download to your computer as lomax-original.iff 

6) then download the iff2png.zip file at the top of this tutorial, extract it and go to that webpage, hit click to browse at the top and load the lomax-original.iff image, this handy tool will then show 1 Indexed Png  (Exact Indexes), hit Download below that and it will save it to your computer as lomax-original_indexed.png, it will also show 2 Copper palette map, hit Download below that and it will save to your computer as lomax-original_palette.png, rename lomax-original_indexed.png to lomaxlevel.png and move it to your lomax Scorpion project folder, don't do anything to the lomax-original_palette.png yet

7) make a new tileset in Scorpion under the Maps tab, use lomaxlevel.png for the image, name the tileset lomaxtileset, create a new map in Scorpion using lomaxtileset and name it lomaxmap, then hit edit map in Scorpion

8) resize the map in Tiled to width 24 (image only needs 20 but emphasizes the idea you can make it bigger) and height 15 (for 240 vertical resolution), then erase the whole map in Tiled to have it blank, still in Tiled put the whole lomaxtileset into the map, save the map in Tiled

9) in a paint program (I use Aseprite) create an image the size of the map 384x240 that is whatever index 0 is in lomax-original_palette.png so in this case just black 000000 and call it blank.png , in Scorpion add a new Panel, use blank.png as the image and call it lomaxpanel, change it from main middle panel to Amiga copper sky, change it to 4 bp / 16 colors and select lomaxpanel as background under the Maps tab of Scorpion

10) under panels in Scorpion hit Edit panel copper and choose 16 colors, this will create a copper image called lomaxpanel.copper.png, now delete that lomaxpanel.copper.png file and then find lomax-original_palette.png from step 6 and rename it to lomaxpanel.copper.png and move it to your lomax Scorpion project folder if it isn't already there 

11) under the Code tab in Scorpion go to startup, add Display - Configure screen, make Y Res 240, then add a new line Level - level, under level choose lomaxmap 

12) we can still add hardware sprites so I put a 1 frame 16 color Sonic sprite in that you can download at the top of this tutorial, save the palette of the Sonic image in Aseprite, I named it sonicpal.png, then import that palette into Scorpion under the Project tab, then hit 0, 16, 16, then under the Animations tab in Scorpion add a new animation called sonicanim and choose your sonic image and make sure he is Onlysprite Attached_16 colors in the bottom right corner, then in the Actor tab create a new actor with the sonicanim animation and call him sonic, make all his speeds 1.5 and choose Control 8 directional movement under movement type, then go to the Maps tab and hit edit map, on the actor layer place Sonic into the beginning of the map and save it in Tiled

13) in the Scorpion Projects tab hit Run in WinUAE