If I did a color port, I'd have two options, which is grosged's sprite and text lib, which would probably not be too slow given the extra CE CPU speed. I could also use ICE, but it tends to break after a while when new C libs come out and I haven't used it in a long while. If I use grosged's libs, the game won't be in one file, but two other games I made use the same libs so if people have them installed then it's not too bad.
But yeah the layered text sprites trick doesn't work on the color models, sadly.