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31

Gaming / Re: "10 Games To Get To Know Me..."

« Last post by dark_lord_zagato on February 28, 2026, 07:10:33 pm »

I could fill this up with Final Fantasy and Zelda games, but to keep this interesting i'll limit my choices to one game per franchise.

These are games that I played obsessively when they came out. Games that warped my mind or left a lasting impression.


Secret of Mana (SNES)
Chrono Trigger (SNES)
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES)
Final Fantasy III (US) (SNES)
Inindo: Way of the Ninja (SNES)
Xenogears (Playstation)
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (Playstation)
Breath of Fire III (Playstation)
Crystalis (NES)
Little Ninja Brothers (NES)

32

Gaming / Re: "10 Games To Get To Know Me..."

« Last post by TerraEsperZ on February 27, 2026, 10:32:24 pm »

In order to limit my selection to ten, I went for games that really "connected" with me in some ways despite not always being objectively all that good. Each one became a temporary obsession and I wish I could go back to experience them again for the 1st time:

Super Mario Galaxy 2 (2010)
Portal 2 (2011)
FEZ (2012)
Antichamber (2013)
NaissanceE (2014)
Undertale (2015)
INFRA (2016)
Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition (2016)
FAR: Lone Sails (2018)
Outer Wilds (2019)

33

Map Requests / Re: JonLeung's Requests

« Last post by dark_lord_zagato on February 27, 2026, 11:48:13 am »

I was going to comment about what an odd decision it is to port a Game Boy game to the NES with virtually no improvements, but then I noticed this was originally a PC game from 1989.

It was called "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Action Game" and it was released on a bunch of different systems at the same time.

The crazy part is their decision to port the Game Boy version to the NES instead of the PC or even the Commodore 64 versions, which honestly look a lot better. This came out in December 1993 and it's a massive downgrade to games from 1989, for systems that had less powerful hardware than the NES.

34

Map Requests / Re: JonLeung's Requests

« Last post by JonLeung on February 26, 2026, 04:29:01 pm »

Can we expect the other Last Crusade NES game to be mapped too?

Well, what do you know.  On the topic of comparing things, zagato blackfist came through again by providing us with maps of Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade (UbiSoft)!

This is the more action-oriented UbiSoft version.  Its palette is very limited, and when you compare it to the Game Boy version earlier mapped by Gennadiy_Master, it appears they just made the Game Boy one first, or with it in mind, and then just ported it over to the NES, just adding a palette but not increasing the number of colours much (sort of like a Game Boy game on a Super Game Boy).

It's nice to have both NES versions of Tetris, both NES versions of Ms. Pac-Man, both NES versions of Rainbow Islands, and now both NES versions of Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade.

35

Map Requests / Re: JonLeung's Requests

« Last post by JonLeung on February 26, 2026, 01:30:04 pm »

Castlevania Crypt.com has now allowed VGMaps.com to host the maps of Castlevania: Harmony Of Despair!

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the series (the Famicom version of Castlevania came out in September 1986), so it's nice to finally have full maps of Harmony Of Despair, a game that includes past Castlevania locales and characters.

Of particular interest to me is Chapter 10: Origin, a DLC stage based on the entirety of the original 8-bit Castlevania.  It has some modifications, like the underground part being extended and the following stage being reversed, an extra floor added to the purplish dungeon area, among other changes.

Compare it for yourself:

Revned's unmarked Castlevania (NES) map:
https://vgmaps.com/Atlas/NES/index.htm#Castlevania


Castlevania Crypt's Castlevania: Harmony Of Despair's Chapter 10: Origin map:
https://vgmaps.com/Atlas/X360/index.htm#CastlevaniaHarmonyOfDespair


I'll probably be saying it again in the autumn, but happy 40th anniversary, Castlevania!

36

Gaming / Re: "10 Games To Get To Know Me..."

« Last post by mechaskrom on February 25, 2026, 11:10:31 am »

Choosing just 10 games is hard, but I tried to pick some favorites from different genres that I really like.
Final Fantasy 6 (SNES)
Super Metroid (SNES)
Settlers IV (PC)
Silent Hill 3 (PS2)
Castlevania SOTN (PSX)
FlatOut 2 (PS2)
Secret of Mana (SNES)
Solomon's Key 2 / Fire 'n Ice (NES)
Guardian Legend (NES)
Super Probotector / Contra 3 (SNES)

37

Map Requests / Re: JonLeung's Requests

« Last post by JonLeung on February 24, 2026, 05:30:46 pm »

We've got the maps for Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade (Taito), thanks to zagato blackfist!

This is the Taito version, not to be confused with UbiSoft's "The Action Game" version.  Seems silly to have two games on the same platform with the same name... and their box art is pretty much the same too, based on the same still from the movie, no doubt opening the door for more confusion.

Thanks as always, zagato!  Can we expect the other Last Crusade NES game to be mapped too?

38

VGMaps Social Board / Re: Are there any graphics apps/plugins that can reduce an image to integer scale?

« Last post by eishiya on February 22, 2026, 01:10:20 pm »

I've generally found it sufficient to use nearest neighbour scaling down to the 1x size. As long as the unevenly scaled image hasn't been cropped or unevenly scaled again, and doesn't include layers that have been misaligned after being unevenly scaled up, the sampling tends to line up such that you get back the original pixels. If the image has been cropped slightly, extruding the edges by an appropriate amount prior to scaling can help.

I included a bunch of caveats there - nearest neighbour scaling should work for situations where the image is scaled after being composited, or where all the component parts are scaled up nearest neighbour in exactly the same way, which is the usual case with emulators of retro consoles like the NES. Some modern games (and some emulators of 3D-capable consoles like the DS) use this sort of uneven scaling independently for different assets or do "subpixel" (relative to the 1x artwork size) alignment between layers/assets that causes what amounts to a mixture of pixel grids, and scaling the entire image cannot get a clean result. In such cases, I've found nothing that works better than separating the elements, scaling them independently, and re-compositing them. When I encounter such games (sadly quite common with modern pixel art games using general-purpose engines such as Unity), I generally either find a way to make them render 1x to begin with, treat it as a high-res game and don't aim for pixel accuracy, or, most frequently, don't map the game at all.

39

VGMaps Social Board / Are there any graphics apps/plugins that can reduce an image to integer scale?

« Last post by JonLeung on February 20, 2026, 06:17:16 pm »

Since I got some help from the forums about a specific graphical editing need before, I have another one that I hope can be solved...

Let's say I have a screenshot like this:


Specifically, this is from Mega Man 9, in the PC version of Mega Man: Legacy Collection 2.  This collection has a problem of not scaling with an integer scale, so the graphics aren't cleanly 1:1.  I believe they should be 256 x 224 of 256 x 240 like NES games should be, not 874 x 768.  And then Mega Man 10 screenshots are 922 x 767.  So weird.  The "pixels" aren't consistent in height or width, obviously if they were all perfect squares I could resize them down to 1:1 with no issue.

Now I have tried to use some "ReShade" thing I downloaded that's supposed to fix this problem, with setting for specific games, but I can't seemingly get it to work quite right.  That's a moot point though, as I'd like a more general fix for any screenshot like this from any game.  (Mega Man 9 and 10 have already been mapped by Revned, anyway, but I just want certain screenshots, is all.)

I imagine there must be a way for a dedicated tool, or perhaps a plugin, to compare each column to adjacent ones, and each row to adjacent ones.  If columns or rows are identical, then it could reduce them to just one row or column.  It might take multiple takes, but I would think that by the end what should remain is a 1:1 screenshot.

Does that make sense?  Is there already some way to do that in GIMP or Paint Shop Pro, or a plugin for Paint.net, or if not, could one be made?

Thanks in advance!

40

Map Requests / Re: List of unmapped NES games

« Last post by dark_lord_zagato on February 17, 2026, 11:13:50 am »

King Neptune's Adventure is now fully mapped and was posted yesterday. For those of you who are familiar with this game, and might be wondering how in the actual hell I was able to screenshot the 10th bill, i'm going to share a few things that I dug up in my research.

Color Dreams made a bunch of unlicensed games back in the 1990s. There was some kind of contest to promote these games and get them to sell better. I'm not too familiar with the details of this contest or how you would go about claiming the prize, but I think the challenge in King Neptune's Adventure involved collecting 10 of these dollars that are hidden throughout the game.

I couldn't seem to locate the last several bills on my own, and GameFAQs didn't have this information, so I did some searching and found what I was looking for on another forum.

The community on Video Game Sage figured this out last year. One of their members, 0xDEAFC0DE, analyzed the code of the game and found some absurd conditions that were placed on finding the 10th bill. A very specific number of lives, seahorses, and bombs, as well as the easiest bill to find secretly disqualifying you if you pick it up before the end of the game.

If I hadn't found this post I would have just assumed the last bill was bugged, or doesn't exist, and wouldn't have included it in my maps.