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Now I see why the PC section has the largest maps by file size.

This is one of the most impressive maps i've ever seen.

https://youtu.be/WP10MXnUIpo?t=117

This is a productive community and everyone here should be proud of themselves.

Zagato, why did you pick Inindo: Way of the Ninja? I haven't played it, but it has really mixed reviews online and doesn't seem very good. Plus, it's made by Koei. 

Is it worth playing anyway?

No, it's really not. This falls under the category of bad games that we like for personal reasons.

A friend of mine gave this to me back in the 1990s, when we were in highschool, and showed me the basics of how this game works. The graphics and sound are pathetic for an SNES game, and while the story is okay there isn't anything too special about it.

What really sold us was all the stuff you can do outside of storyline progress. You can just forget about your mission and screw around for years of in-game time. I wanted to explore all of Japan and find the towns that you have no real reason to go to. My friend liked recruiting all the generic characters just to sell their stuff and kick them out of the party. We both liked tracking down the characters that are hostile towards the hero, so we could challenge them to a duel and beat the CRAP out of them. Later on in the game I found out you could take spying and sabotage missions, and even help out in wars between provinces. I tried to turn the entire mini-map of Japan yellow (for Tokugawa Ieyatsu) but only conquered half of it before my generals were stretched too thin.

So that was pretty fun, but I always wished I could have a world map of this game to make it easier to navigate. VGmaps came along some time later, and then after waiting silently for a few years I finally realized that if I ever wanted these maps I would just have to make them myself.

You know what that means. Inindo is the game that got me into mapping in the first place. If this is a list of games that had a big influence on us then Inindo really should be on my list.

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)

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.

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.

That's a cool thing to have in your collection. Using a Miracle Piano in a song about NES games was a nice touch.

Anyway, that's very interesting that the codes you (zagato) found happen to work the same way on the NES, Super NES, and Genesis.  Is that a common occurrence, codes being interchangeable between games that appear on multiple platforms?

No. It's a very rare occurrence. Even Smash TV doesn't do that. I've been playing with Game Genies and Gamesharks since the 1990s and i've never seen codes work across different platforms before.

The R.B.I. Baseball games on NES use many of the exact same codes, but these are all on the same system.

[NES]

As you may have noticed, maps of Miracle Piano on the NES are now available.

The Miracle Piano Teaching System is an educational game that was sold with it's own hardware. Menu navigation is possible with normal controllers but the actual gameplay requires an electronic keyboard that is not supported by any emulators that I am aware of. As a result, it is not possible to play this game normally except with original hardware.

It took me a few attempts to figure this out. After some confusion and some poking around I finally realized that you need to use controller 2 to navigate the menu on the NES and SNES versions. It makes sense. Other games that use special hardware, such the Nintendo light zapper, expect you to put the light zapper in port 1 and the d-pad controller in port 2.

The gameplay for this depends entirely on playing the piano, but you can overcome your lack of original hardware on emulators with cheat codes that seem to be exactly the same for every system Miracle Piano was released on.

There is a side scrolling minigame called Robo-Man. This is the only part of the game worth mapping and the codes that i'm sharing were made for this specific task. There are 48 different songs. Every song has it's own notes at the bottom.

I currently have no plans to map the SNES and Genesis versions myself. I'll be quite busy mapping NES games for at least the next year. I'm leaving these instructions for anybody who might wish to rip all the graphics for these games themselves.




NES

Use controller port 2. Press A to get to the child/adult mode settings, then press start to get to the welcome screen. Press select to get to the options screen. Pick practice room. Pick a song. Pick Robo-Man. Use the following codes to make the game run by itself without any further input from the player. Turn the sprite layer off and start taking screenshots.

7E3F:04 Invincible (System Bus Memory Domain)
7ED8:28 Infinite Fuel (System Bus Memory Domain)
7F0A:16 Set Robot To Build Mode (System Bus Memory Domain)




SNES

Use controller port 2. Go to the welcome screen. Press select on controller 2 to go to the options screen. Pick practice room. Pick a song. Pick Robo-Man. Use the following codes to make the game run by itself without any further input from the player. Rip the background layers separately and put them together when you're done.

7E3F:04 Invincible (WRAM Memory Domain)
7ED8:28 Infinite Fuel (WRAM Memory Domain)
7F0A:16 Set Robot To Build Mode (WRAM Memory Domain)




Genesis

Use controller port 1 for the Genesis version. Press start to get to the main menu. Pick arcade. Pick a song. Pick Roboman. Use the following codes to make the game run by itself without any further input from the player. Rip the background layers separately and put them together when you're done.

7E3F:04 Invincible (68K RAM Memory Domain)
7ED8:28 Infinite Fuel (68K RAM Memory Domain)
7F0A:16 Set Robot To Build Mode (68K RAM Memory Domain)

I just checked, and even if you delete Ratix from your party and only have one other character, the map character will still be Ratix. It might not even be possible to change map characters in this game, unfortunately.

It would be nice if there were better programs for displaying everything in a ROM visually. Zophar's Domain has tile viewers, but this stuff hasn't been worked on in decades and most SNES roms look like a total mess.

You're Barack Obama on TSR? It looks like you've done quite a lot of work over there.

Has Star Ocean a code that will let you turn into npc characters too? So far, I've only seen something like that for Secret of Mana.
If you've seen my npc sheets on tsr, there are multiple npcs which don't move. There might be walk frames for them, but I'm not quite sure and would like to check it out.

Not that I know of. Probably the most you could do is change the character ID for the person in front, but you would always be limited to playable characters.

On this subject, I have a Secret of Mana video where I show off three different methods of getting into places i'm not supposed to. There's the map ID code, some x/y coordinate codes, and also a code that determines whether or not the player is holding the controller. If you turn this on during a cutscene, the cutscene is paused and you can walk around and do whatever you want. I always put my PAR codes in the video description.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SD_siXnI0M

After taking a closer look I think the room modifier should be a two part code. Anyway, here's the codes that take you to the docked Calnus.

7E0461B7 Room modifier set to docked Calnus
7E046201 (Part 2 of code. 00 is the first set of 256 rooms and 01 is the next set of 256 rooms.)


I'll fix the Time Gate code to have both values...

7E04610E Room modifier set to Time Gate
7E046200


Here's a few others I noticed.


7E0461B9 Room modifier set to restaurant cutscene
7E046201

7E0461E1 Room modifier set to meeting room cutscene
7E046200

Hello. In the event you are unable to get in contact with Tropicon I have my own solution for this problem.

I was just now able to achieve freedom of movement at the Time Gate by using a room modifier code. This code will work upon exiting a room, so go into an item shop or something and take a savestate next to the door. Turn the code on and leave and you should be at the Time Gate. You won't be in a cutscene so you can walk around freely.

This was done in BizHawk but you should be able to adapt it to other emulators too.

Go to hex editor, make sure the memory domain says WRAM, freeze 000461 and poke the value to 0E.

If you find yourself stuck in a wall just use some position modifier codes to get out of there.

002013 = Horizontal Position
002016 = Vertical Position


They would look like this as PAR codes.

7E04610E Room modifier code (Set to Time Gate)
7E2013?? Horizontal Axis
7E2016?? Vertical Axis

Thanks as always. I remember the biggest challenge with this one was compiling all the rooms in a way that actually makes sense. I was originally going to treat this like The Legend of Zelda with the city as the overworld and the houses/sewers as the underworld, but when I found out this wouldn't work I had to make a new plan.

I changed my mind several times in fact. In the end I only decided what the layout for these maps would be after I beat the game and collected screenshots of every last room.

["Better VGMaps" has never contacted me by any means to ask permission to host my maps.I would not have given them my permission to host my maps on their clone site if they had asked me.Better VGMaps is hosting my maps without my consent.]

Jon also pointed this out to me a few years ago and asked me if I knew anything about it. I told him I had no idea they were hosting my maps until he brought it up.

"Better VGMaps" has never contacted me by any means to ask permission to host my maps.

I would not have given them my permission to host my maps on their clone site if they had asked me.

Better VGMaps is hosting my maps without my consent.

It is unfortunate, but as FlyingArmor says, there is very little we can do about it. We can play a game of Whack-A-Mole with that site, and just watch it pop back up on different hosts each time it gets knocked down, but that seems like a waste of effort. I'm just going to do my part to tell people about the real VGMaps, and if they ask me about the plagiarized site i'll just tell them the truth about it...