I was actually working on a port of Tilengine for Monogame, that would have been able to do exactly what is being described here. But there wasn’t enough interest, so I’m just finishing up support for Unity instead. (where there is more of a need for this sort of support)
While there is plenty of demand for modern rendering approaches, there is still some interest in legacy rendering. (just very niche and small) There are some effects that are better handled through full color palette manipulation.
Tilengine - the 2D retro graphics engine
A community discussion about the plug-in
A recent tutorial I wrote, where I embed Tilengine into Unity