Messages

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Maps Of The Month / Re: 2023/07: Mission: Impossible (NES) - mechaskrom

« on: July 10, 2023, 07:38:27 am »

Thank you.

I really like this game. Sure!, it's difficult, especially the two vertical autoscrolling stages, but it's another Konami-quality NES-game with good graphics and music.

Mapping it was pretty fun, but adding all the enemy sprites was a bit boring though. And I'm not 100% happy with how switches and what they affected were annotated, but it was the most straightforward solution I could think of. Hopefully it at least makes sense when playing the game.

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Mapping Tips/Guides / Re: Save images of SimCity (SNES) cities (SimCityMapper)

« on: July 10, 2022, 09:35:01 pm »

It should be possible to create something like this for similar building games. It requires some reverse-engineering though which I'm sadly not very good at.

In this case I was lucky because most of what I needed to create the SimCity tool had already been figured out here:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/snes/588657-simcity/faqs/73744
https://github.com/usrshare/snescityeditor
So I'm very thankful to the persons behind that work.

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Mapping Tips/Guides / Save images of SimCity (SNES) cities (SimCityMapper)

« on: May 01, 2022, 10:25:24 am »

I always wanted a way to save images of your cities so I made a tool here:
https://github.com/mechaskrom/SimCityMapper

Maybe it can be useful to other SimCity players.

Does anyone know if something similar already exist? I couldn't find anything at least.

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VGMaps Social Board / Re: VGMaps.com's 20th Anniversary - PROMO VIDEO CHALLENGE!

« on: April 29, 2022, 06:31:34 pm »

I don't have the video editing skills, but I'm looking forward to seeing what others can come up with.

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Mapping Tips/Guides / Re: Here's how to remove the black background when removing the BG Layer in FCEUX

« on: March 10, 2021, 11:17:35 am »

A .pal file is just 192 bytes with 3 bytes per color entry (64*3=192). There's also files that include the emphasis colors (3 bits = 8 combinations) and are therefore 1536 bytes (8*64*3=1536). The 3 bytes represents the common RGB color.
https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/.pal

So if you want to edit for example entry 30 then you change the 3 bytes that start at 90 bytes (30*3=90) into the .pal file (0x5A in hex). There are online hex editors if you want to try it. Use the goto function in the upper right to navigate to the starting byte.
https://hexed.it/

Or use a palette editor. The old Nesten emulator has one built-in that's pretty nice (Vid -> Palette Console...).
https://tnse.zophar.net/Files/NESten06BetaF.zip
https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/1572/

Make sure to use a good NES palette as a source. There are many floating around that looks awful IMO. This one is pretty good:
https://tcrf.net/images/f/f4/NES_NTSC_Palette.zip

Then after you changed entry 30 to e.g. magenta (255,0,255 = 0xFF,0x00,0xFF) just set the "gNoBGFillColor" to 30 and load the custom palette in FCEUX (Config -> Palette...) .

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Mapping Tips/Guides / Re: Here's how to remove the black background when removing the BG Layer in FCEUX

« on: February 16, 2021, 01:50:49 pm »

Thinking about it some more. I believe that many of the black colors like 30, 31, 46 and 47 are rarely used by games, so making a custom palette with your wanted background color in one of these indices should work pretty well together with "gNoBGFillColor". Just an idea.

7

Mapping Tips/Guides / Re: Here's how to remove the black background when removing the BG Layer in FCEUX

« on: February 16, 2021, 01:35:50 pm »

The number is a palette index. Here's an image of the NES palette with the numbers/indices:
http://www.mediafire.com/view/6xbrskg256wtco6/nes_palette_numbers.png/file
I believe only 0-63 are valid. Higher values probably just wraps around. Value 255 is special for don't override background color(?).

It's too bad that you can't specify a custom color instead of using one from the palette. Would've made it easier to pick a unique background color for games. Better than nothing though.

8

Mapping Tips/Guides / Re: Is there a program that automatically creates a map from a screen capture?

« on: July 26, 2020, 11:01:55 am »

Not sure if this is what you want, but have you tried Maxim's screenshot autostitcher?

https://www.vgmaps.com/forums/index.php?topic=516.0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGR5PbvFY10&list=PL56690DF60ECAD041&index=2

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Mapping Tips/Guides / Re: WideNES - Peeking Past the edge of NES Games

« on: September 08, 2018, 01:16:51 pm »

It's a cool feature, but with limited use and will probably never work with all games and situations.

Like I mentioned in this thread: https://www.vgmaps.com/forums/index.php?topic=2370.msg19564#msg19564
I would prefer great scripting support in emulators instead. It's a more general and powerful solution.

10

Mapping Tips/Guides / Re: How do I stitch together a bunch of screenshots in Paint.net to make a map?

« on: September 08, 2018, 11:58:38 am »

Manually stitching screenshots is probably the most straightforward method, but it's tedious and has a high chance of mistakes. It's also hard to map areas without "landmarks" e.g. Solar Jetman (NES) which has big areas with the same color or pattern. You could facilitate this by using cheat codes to move the camera around in discrete values or keep track of it with a memory/ram watcher. That way you know how the screenshots fit together. You probably need camera cheat codes anyway to reach inaccessible parts and cover everything.

Reverse engineering the game to create a tool or editor that can extract maps is probably the complete opposite method to manual stitching. Technically very complicated and requires great programming skills, but in return makes mapping a lot easier and faster.

Fortunately there is a way to automate screenshot mapping with only modest skills and that is to use scripting or an external tool to control the emulator. All my maps are done with this method. Take NES-games for example were I use FCEUX which has many excellent tools for mapping, particularly lua-scripting: http://www.fceux.com/web/help/fceux.html?LuaScripting.html
You can write a lua-script that essentially moves the camera, take screenshots and stitches everything together i.e. automating the whole process of ripping a map. Creating a working script can take some time though, but a lot less than manual stitching. You probably need to manually fix some things in the rip afterwards to, but most of the work can be scripted.

Unfortunately good emulators with scripting is a bit lacking. So if any emulator author is reading this, please add great scripting support to your emulator and you'll make me a very happy mapper. 

11

Map Requests / Re: Mission Impossible for NES

« on: December 12, 2017, 07:17:23 pm »

Can you add also the Intro, Cutscenes, Briefing to the Levels? And the different Titlescreens Ultra/Palcom. End Sequence too.

Even if nice to have I think things like these are out of scope for maps. I like to keep it simple so I try to avoid adding to much superfluous stuff.
Maybe I'll add some screenshots from cutscenes if they don't take up to much space. Sorry to disappoint you, but I hope you'll still like the maps.

12

Map Requests / Re: Mission Impossible for NES

« on: October 30, 2017, 11:12:33 pm »

Yeah, it's a hard game, but pretty good with nice graphic and sound. A typical Konami NES game.

It turned out to be a hard game to map also.   
I'll probably need to do a lot of manual work to rip everything. It'll take some time, but I'm slowly making progress.

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Map Requests / Re: Mission Impossible for NES

« on: October 16, 2017, 08:37:52 pm »

I'm interested in mapping this game so I'll give it a try.

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VGMaps Social Board / Re: VGMaps is now 15 years old!

« on: May 09, 2017, 05:41:59 pm »

Happy birthday to this wonderful site.

I had to take a break from mapping, but hopefully I can continue mapping soon. There are many more games that I want maps of so there's that at least, but I agree with Revned that the whole mapping community has probably reached a saturation point. Let's see after 15 more years.

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Maps Of The Month / Re: 2017/02: Solar Jetman (NES) - mechaskrom

« on: February 13, 2017, 11:27:21 am »

By the way. Is planet 12 Miplezur supposed to be pronounced "My Pleasure"? Rare being ironic? My suffering (Mizuferin?) would be a more appropriate name.