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VGMaps Social Board / Happy Anniversary, Kokopolo!

« Last post by Cyartog959 on August 11, 2025, 09:31:54 am »

It's Kokopolo's debut anniversary today, and I felt showing some artwork to celebrate this day. (I can only give video links for the moment, unless I learn how to display actual videos from YouTube here. Sorry.)

The first game's artwork

Here's the bosses of Kokopolo 3D Keith Webb made when it was in the works in 2012, a very short time after it began in June 2012(still would be nice to see clean versions of these bosses).

SCARECLOWN

DUST RA RA

KAMALOON

JITSTAR

KINTARON

CACTUSK

BANDOZA(Incorrectly spelled as "BANDOZER")

SHINTOTO

ROCK A TOCK

MIKOSUKI

Here's Kokopolo DX's Logo and Cover Artwork for those who want to see.

There's some artwork about the game's development history when it was targeted for Neo Geo Pocket Color, before it was changed and moved to Game Boy Advance, DS, and finally, DSiWare. Let me tell you, I have never seen it before now, and it is amazing! Take a look!

KOKOPOLO SKETCHES 1

KOKOPOLO SKETCHES 2

KOKOPOLO LINEUP

KOKOPOLO BOSS LINEUP

Keith pondered if he could make a new Neo Geo Pocket Color game for it as a de-make, but I would honestly feel it should be a prequel, fittingly called "Go! Go! Kokopolo Pocket", centered on how Kokopolo and Tatsumo became best friends and how their adventures began, before the DSiWare debut. And, the handheld should have new second screen hardware add-on created that acts as a precursor to the DS dual-screen gameplay.

If I could see the finalized artwork of all of Kokpolo DX's bosses, I'd show them to you here.

Keith made a very well-known favorite artwork centered on the Wii's Virtual Console's commemoration. Here's the image called "Hyper 8-Bit Memories"!

There's a video review about Kokopolo 3D after its launch. Here's the link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc5VkWvOePo

If Keith could stop by, he'd know I was doing good at bringing more attention to the series. Maybe he'd come by sometime, if he's able.

If you like to see some insight about him and his pal, Jmac, there's a video here. If you want to watch the whole thing, go ahead. The timestamp for Keith's projects in the works is 19:20, if you want to skip to it. Here's the video's link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViFp0M1EyC8

If anyone here wants to do some celebrating about the series, feel free.

Maps In Progress / Re: VGCartography - getting to work on PS1 maps!

« Last post by JonLeung on August 11, 2025, 09:22:37 am »

Quote from: YelseyKing on August 11, 2025, 01:15:28 am

Site report, though: the link to the map of the last stage in MediEvil is broken. Just figured I'd point that out. Hopefully Jon sees this.

Thanks for the report. And for VGCartography for letting me know before I saw it here...

I do have a habit of testing every link after putting up maps, and while I did test it initially, that was when I noticed that Zarok's Lair is included in the map. So I went back into my files to rename the link, but apparently I hadn't renamed the actual file and forgot to retest.

It's been fixed now, but it can take a while for all the servers to catch up to the change. If it's still not appearing for you, try a refresh, or a hard refresh with Ctrl+F5 or Shift+F5.

Maps In Progress / Re: VGCartography - getting to work on PS1 maps!

« Last post by YelseyKing on August 11, 2025, 01:15:28 am »

Awesome work, as usual. Nice to finally see FF9 and MediEvil finished (as an aside, your maps encouraged me to give that game a try back when they were first posted, as they looked neat... and I had fun with it!), and the Parasite Eve maps are pretty dang sweet, too. Site report, though: the link to the map of the last stage in MediEvil is broken. Just figured I'd point that out. Hopefully Jon sees this.

Map Requests / Re: JonLeung's Requests

« Last post by JonLeung on August 10, 2025, 07:19:29 pm »

VGCartography has hit me with a bunch of PlayStation game maps to publish here, they'll certainly be up, but it won't all be right away. But I certainly prioritized Final Fantasy IX and Parasite Eve!

This double-helping of PlayStation games has also doubled up the number of fulfilled PlayStation requests thus far.

I didn't spend a ton of time with the original PlayStation back in the day as I probably should have, but the games I did play I certainly enjoyed, especially these two Square offerings. I've mentioned here multiple times why I played Parasite Eve essentially four times to truly finish it, and Final Fantasy IX is among my favourite Final Fantasy games ever. It's nice to see maps of them here now.

There will be even more PlayStation maps from VGCartography up here soon, look forward to them! Thanks again, VGCartography! Your work continues to be amazing.

...And on another note, if anyone's wondering, I am still working on my Beyond Shadowgate (2024, PC) maps. I decided to make "maps" just showing every single possible screen (like what zagato blackfist did with the NES games Shadowgate, Deja Vu, and Uninvited), including all the ridiculous combinations and permutations of all the variable things on each screen. Kind of ridiculous. I think I have them all, and all assembled, too, it's now just a matter of putting on my name and etc. on them, so hopefully I'll be able to show those soon...ish.

Maps Of The Month / Re: 2020/03: Earthworm Jim (Genesis) - G.E.R.

« Last post by G.E.R. on August 10, 2025, 12:11:09 pm »

It was unexpected to saw this game on a passenger tablet on the plane (Airbus A350-941). Not playable due to lack of gamepad

Maps In Progress / Re: VGCartography - getting to work on PS1 maps!

« Last post by VGCartography on August 10, 2025, 09:15:17 am »

Just submitted the last few FF9 maps, after being dormant on them since 2022! Now most of FF8 and FF9 are up, at long last.

Gaming / Re: About "Hatch Tales"...

« Last post by VictorCook on August 05, 2025, 09:06:36 pm »

Ever wonder why some games flop despite talented developers? I think it's because the vision isn't clear or cohesive. I once worked on a project where everyone had different ideas, and the final product was a mess.

Map Requests / Re: "Tom and Jerry: Frantic Antics"

« Last post by mechaskrom on August 05, 2025, 08:45:46 am »

Welcome to VGMaps.

Nice work on your maps so far, but I really hope that you only used JPEG, a lossy image format, for the attachments. A lossless image format like PNG is preferable for 2D maps to preserve the ripped images. High quality (low compression) JPEG might be okay for images with millions of colors like 3D maps though.

Manually stitching screenshots is something I did in my first mapping project to and it's tedious. One alternative is to try Maxim's autostitcher. It can stitch maps from a lossless video (something the BizHawk emulator can record). Record a video of playing a stage and then feed it to the autostitcher. Results may vary though.
https://www.smspower.org/maxim/Software/ScreenshotAutostitcher

However, I highly recommend looking into lua-scripting with the BizHawk emulator instead. You don't need a lot of programming experience to create scripts that can automate a lot of the stitching.
https://tasvideos.org/BizHawk
https://tasvideos.org/Bizhawk/LuaFunctions

I put together a lua-script for Tom and Jerry that you can use. The layers for the first three stages and the script can be downloaded from here:
https://www.mediafire.com/file/ycugr6or75fl6zs/Tom+Jerry+Frantic+lua+20250805.zip/file

Run the game in BizHawk and then select Tools -> Lua Console and open/run the script in the opened dialog to stitch the current stage. I only tried it on the first three stages, but it seems to work. Before running the script you can configure visible layers in GEN -> Settings. Set 'use custom backdrop color' to true to make it easy to remove transparent sections (magenta) in layers.

Personally I like to script-stitch the main and sprite layers separately and then compose them in an image editor. That way you can remove or move sprites on the maps in an image editor. The sprite layers I ripped are a bit messy and need to be manually reviewed. I hope you at least consider adding non-moving sprites to the maps. Makes them more complete IMO.

Feel free to ask if you have any questions.

Map Requests / Re: "Tom and Jerry: Frantic Antics"

« Last post by Cyartog959 on August 03, 2025, 11:30:01 pm »

Well, it is really nice to have you in the VGMaps community, and I'm really glad you share the forum's love here! I'm sure you'll enjoy some time hanging out here! Welcome!

And, yes, the process can be oftentimes long, depending on maps' sizes, but, with building endurance and confidence, you'll get the hang of it in no time.

Once you have all the game's maps finished, which is always nice, you can submit the maps to the site so it can be seen in the Atlas very soon.

Map Requests / "Tom and Jerry: Frantic Antics"

« Last post by kiddingfan on August 03, 2025, 06:09:14 am »

Hey everyone,

I'm a huge fan of a classic game from my childhood, "Tom and Jerry: Frantic Antics" on the Sega Genesis. It's a really fun platformer that I don't see talked about much.

I started a personal project in 2017 to get the full maps for this game. I've been doing it the hard way: taking countless screenshots from an emulator and carefully stitching them together. It's a slow process, but I've managed to finish the maps for Level 2, Level 3, Level 4, and Level 5.

Honestly, getting every pixel right is really tough and takes forever. I know there are incredibly talented people on this forum who are experts at ripping map data directly from the game's files, which is far beyond my technical skill.

I found this amazing forum through the recommendation of an LLM. I'm making this post to share my love for this game and to humbly ask if any of you experts would be interested in helping to create a complete map set. It would be amazing to finally have this great game fully preserved on VGMaps for everyone to see.

I'm more than happy to contribute the maps I've already completed, of course.

Thanks for reading and for any help or advice you can offer!

Cheers
Wenbin

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