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I have a small bit of advice for anyone who tries Paint.net

There is a way to save your tool preferences after you get started.

Open paint.net and put all the tool settings where you like them. Don't forget to select the bucket and turn anti-alias off, this is very important. The icon will be in the middle of the tool bar while the bucket is selected. Make sure it says "aliased rendering."

Next, click the settings button. It's the gear icon in the upper right of the window. Go to tools. Click on the option that says "Load From Toobar."

Settings/Tools
Load From Toolbar

These are now your default settings when you open Paint.net and you never have to worry about it again.

5) Will add it to the requests. Let see what the author can come up with. So basically you want a way to view polygonal characters and the 3d map as a flat image or as a 3d image?
I don't know if that's possible, but I'll add it anyway.

Yes, i'm thinking maybe we can make maps that depict what these race tracks look like from above if there were a way to rip data directly from the Super FX chip.

This might be too much to ask. If they say it's impossible i'll understand.

Emulator features that are helpful to video game mappers:

1. A hex editor/access to the game's memory. Good hex editors show you what's going on live and let you change/freeze values right there.

2. A pop out map viewer that can take screenshots. For SNES games, a toggle that controls which BG layers are used in the screenshot.

3. The ability to change a game's background color. (Some games have map tiles with pixels that are the same color as the background. Black on black is a problem when you need to rip background layers separately.)

4. The ability to screenshot Mode7 data as a 2D image. It is impossible to map some SNES games without this. ZSNES had a special tool called vSNES. It was a stand alone program that could load ZSNES savestates and display Mode7 data in a flat plane. It would let you screenshot this data all at once. As an example, the Human Cannonball map from American Gladiators is something I took with just ONE screenshot in vSNES.


Also, the Super FX chip...

Games like Stunt Race FX use this chip. It generates 3D objects and environments. As far as I know, no one has ever figured out a way to extract any maps from these games. It's not the same thing as Mode7 so vSNES can't do anything with it either.

I found some interesting things while mapping Cobra Triangle. I've set aside some unedited maps to show it off.


This game seems to store the map data for stages 1 and 9 in the same general area inside the ROM. This isn't just a palette swap, it's two different stages in one giant map and they bleed into each other. This led to a fair amount of confusion when I started this project but by the time I was done with stage 9 I knew what was going on.

The stages use different palettes and different tile sets, but you can see how the course is the same. You can also see that i've cleaned up the regular maps quite a bit. This is because the stuff i've cleaned up is WAY out of bounds and looks really bad if left in place.

The NES cartridges don't have a lot of storage and there's a lot of big stages in this game, so perhaps the bigger maps share the same area in the ROM to save space?

Stage 14 contains the map for stages 11 and 18, Shoot The Targets. Yes, these are the same map, but you travel the lower path in 11 and the upper path in 18.


If you've come here from The Cutting Room Floor and want to verify this information for yourself i'll tell you how to boundary break.


My codes:

037D:FF Walk through walls. Toggle this on for a few frames and then turn it back off. You can go outside the normal boundary of the stage but you can't cross the finish line anymore.

0701:?? Set the value to 00 to remove the autopilot in Shoot The Targets. Set the value to 07 to stop the rapids in Reach The Finish and Jump The Waterfall.

0348:?? This is for jump height, but if you set the value to 01 the screen will scroll straight up. If you hit a jump and set the value to F8 you can just fly over everything.



General codes:

00B9:1A Invincible
0714:3B Infinite Time

This was the first anime I watched with subtitles when I got my hands on a VHS tape (eps 13-16) back in early 2000. I liked it so much that used one of the bad guys for my online name.

The SNES version was already on vgmaps but I definitely wanted to map all the other Rayearth games, including this. Saturn emulation wasn't quite perfect yet so this was a bit of a challenge. The emulator used was Yabause because I couldn't get BizHawk to take 1:1 screenshots of Saturn games. Despite all this, the only map that I think needs to be touched up in the future is Crimson Underpass.

I still have the transparent background layers for this game too.

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.