Messages

1

Maps In Progress / Re: (GBA) Super Mario Advance 4

« on: March 06, 2012, 11:07:40 pm »

If you want to play around with the switches, check out the Codebreaker code under "Unused Switch Content" on the Cutting Room Floor page.  Apparently all the effects of all the switches are already programmed into the game and are activated by the bits in that single memory address; all the e-cards do for them is unlock the appropriate colored switches to give you access in game.  I'm sure other kinds of hacking can be used to give you access to the exclusive power-ups and mini-games too, but new levels and level replays must come from the cards themselves.

2

Map Requests / Re: few map requests

« on: March 01, 2012, 02:01:40 am »

Hmm, is the DOS version of Blues Brothers the same as the Amiga version?  I know the NES game was different (riding on animals, no collectibles?), and I also saw an SNES game that was very different (power-ups, no vertical scrolling?).

3

Mapping Tips/Guides / Re: Always check the file format when saving a map!

« on: January 21, 2012, 01:41:45 am »

Since I'm playing at 3 times the original resolution to be able to see anything, I have to resize said screen captures every time. And because I changed the option in Irfanview from "resize" to "resample" for something else and it stuck, I spent several hours messing up every screenshot I took before even assembling the whole thing.

That reminds me of a tip for using Microsoft Paint that should be shared if it hasn't been already: When you use the Stretch/Skew feature to squash or stretch an entire image, Paint will apply that same sort of "resample" effect, adding in-between colors to smooth out diagonal edges or to merge shrunken color boundaries.  But if you use Stretch on a selection, even if it's a selection of the entire image (hit Ctrl+A), it will simply drop rows/columns of pixels when resizing smaller or double up on them when resizing larger.  I think I figured this out when I took screenshots of FCEUX's PPU Viewer, which displays all tiles at double size, and later wondered why the NES fonts I had extracted contained an extra shade of white that was barely distinguishable from the main shade of white when I went to recolor them.

4

Maps Of The Month / Re: 2010/03: Fantastic Dizzy (Genesis) - Jester

« on: October 17, 2010, 02:59:04 pm »

Wow, this is some nice work!  I was starting to make maps of my own for the Nintendo Entertainment System version, "The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy", just last month.  Actually, it's going to be two complete map sets, because the NES game was re-released a couple of times with many major changes.  Thus I'm going to map every area twice so that it becomes clearer what all the changes in terrain and object locations were and they can help anyone who has either version.  Even the later versions of the NES game have a lot of differences from the "Fantastic Dizzy" released on other consoles, so do you think VGMaps has room for two more full map sets?  At the very least we would get maps of that river rapids mini-game that was missing from the "16-bit" versions.  I've been discussing it on TASVideos because I like to make maps to help with potential tool-assisted speedruns, but if there's enough interest, I could start a topic on Maps In Progress so we could discuss how the maps are coming together.

5

Gaming / Re: Somewhat of a map, but more decorative

« on: October 16, 2010, 03:11:11 pm »

Oh, is this about that game "Super Mario Galaxy", and not the real galaxy?

6

Map Gab / Re: Little Samson (NES)

« on: October 03, 2010, 06:11:40 pm »

Yeah, I would have been scared to try to make a complete map set of this game just because of the obscure level skips with obscure conditions like "Beat this boss with this character without carrying a potion", and it doesn't even tell you that you skipped anything.

7

Map Gab / Re: Very, very big maps.

« on: October 03, 2010, 06:08:52 pm »

Every map I submit is procesed by PNGGauntlet. Simply because Photoshop has slow PNG export so I'm saving every map in BMP and then compress them by PNGGauntlet with Xtreme! option. Advanced options are set to default.

I'm a little scared to use PNGGauntlet again, because the last time I did, it just took up more and more of the CPU time until it finally froze up my computer.     Why do you think that happened?

8

VGMaps Social Board / RE: Non Netnavi/Robot Master names

« on: May 27, 2009, 01:28:49 pm »

And ThermoMan's real name is AirConMan, isn't it?

9

Map Requests / RE: map requests for super mario bros 2

« on: May 26, 2009, 05:50:06 pm »

For JonLeung's point, can't you just add co-author credit?



And I wonder if future maps could be presented in layers, with a Javascript function or something to trigger an overlay.

10

Map Requests / RE: map requests for super mario bros 2

« on: May 22, 2009, 12:31:47 am »

Couldn't there be a system to gain permission to edit someone else's maps, so we don't end up with multiple versions of the same map?  What happened with Mega Man 6 still bothers me a little.

11

Map Requests / RE: Robowarrior - NES

« on: May 22, 2009, 12:29:20 am »

I don't know if it makes a big difference, but when I tried the Japanese version of this game, "BomberKing", on an emulator, it was able to display the leftmost column correctly; whereas with RoboWarrior, the left side seems to reflect what's coming up on the right side.  It probably wouldn't hurt to check out both versions if you can.

12

Gaming / RE: Super Mario Bros. 2 Enemy Names - What is correct?

« on: May 22, 2009, 12:15:43 am »

To answer Will's question, according to this page, most of the names are COMPLETELY different. http://themushroomkingdom.net/smb2_j-e.shtml

13

Mapping Tips/Guides / RE: Is it possilbe to rip Balloon Trip mode of Balloon Fight?

« on: April 19, 2009, 02:56:57 pm »

Give it a try and see what happens!

14

Map Gab / RE: Super Mario World

« on: February 23, 2009, 07:03:08 am »

It's an old bug that nobody feels like fixing.

15

Gaming / RE: Box titles versus in-game titles

« on: February 15, 2009, 06:03:01 am »

Oh, yeah, that's about as confusing as "Super 3D Noah's Ark".