Having problems with palettes

Age of Empires II: DE II - Modding
1

I’m trying to import some graphics from a 1998 alpha version of AoE II into DE. As I expected, when I just converted the slp files into smx with convert_slp.bat, the colours got messed up. As I understand it, this is because earlier versions of the game use different palettes for the graphics. Can anyone give me any advice about the best way to convert between these palettes?

I have tried to find the actual palette file for the alpha (in the hopes that I could import the graphics into SLX Studio). The only information I could find is on the modding FAQ on AoK Heaven:
http://aok.heavengames.com/faqs/modding-faq#q9
It says “switch to Interfac.drs and open INT50500”. However, my Interfac.drs doesn’t have a file called INT50500, either for the alpha version or release version of AoK, and all the files are text files. There’s a file called 0000050500.txt that looks like it’s probably a palette, but I can’t work out how to actually use it as a palette. (Changing the file extension to .pal doesn’t seem to work – SLX Studio will let me load it as a palette but the colours are still messed up.)

Any help anyone can give would be hugely appreciated. I haven’t done any modding with this game since before the 2013 rerelease, so I’m a little rusty…

(Also if anyone knows of a mod that has already converted alpha graphics to work in DE, please let me know – I did look but couldn’t find one.)

2

I found a solution to this, and thought I would share in case anyone else has the same problem at some point. If you extract the file using SLX Studio, it shows up as a bin file, but when you extract it you can save it as a pal file, which then works properly as a palette.

I hadn’t realised SLX Studio could do that, so had extracted it with Dragon Unpacker instead. In hindsight this was a mistake, since it seems Dragon Unpacker doesn’t read drs files properly.