Messages

16

Maps In Progress / Re: My mapping projects

« on: January 28, 2022, 06:35:45 pm »

I'm going to share some of my hacking notes for Bart's Nightmare on SNES.


In the Temple of Maggie, the top part of the screen (with the Maggie statues) will scroll at a different pace than the bottom of the screen where all the stepping stones are. This makes it impossible to align the Maggie statues with the stepping stones that would normally have a pacifier fly across them. In fact, the stepping stone walkway is a lot longer than the Maggie statue background at the top of the screen.

PAR code 7E0915?? was used to get the rest of what I needed from the top half of the screen. It only works when Bart is in the air, but paired with the code to make falling non-fatal this is not a problem. If the value is 01 the screen will scroll to the left. Set the value to 20 or higher to make the screen scroll to the right. The lava pool extends forever in both directions.

PAR code 7E00B200 makes falling non-fatal. If you jump on a flaming block and go into the lava you can just jump right back out. You can even out run the pacifiers by mashing right on the d-pad.

PAR codes 7E0E389E and 7E0E39E1 freeze the background animation.

The stepping stones in my maps represent the original position of these stones. This is the way the path will look before you take even one step. To do this, I went into BizHawk's hex editor and froze everything from 0E3B-0ECB in the WRAM.

36 stepping stones in a row multiplied by 4 rows = 144 total stepping stones in the Temple of Maggie.

17

Maps In Progress / Re: Electromax - getting to work on PS1 maps!

« on: January 28, 2022, 04:50:53 pm »

Your work is blowing my mind. Holy cow these PS1 maps come out looking good.

18

Maps In Progress / Re: My mapping projects

« on: January 01, 2022, 09:55:42 pm »

Possible ideas for 2022

Crystalis (Game Boy Color)
Kaitou Saint Tail (Game Gear)
Rollerblade Racer (Nintendo)
Surf Ninjas (Game Gear)

19

VGMaps Social Board / Re: Any idea why the Genesis "index.htm" file is a problematic file?

« on: August 30, 2021, 05:00:39 pm »

What if you upload an empty file with that name? Like, make a new .txt file with nothing in it so it's 0 bytes and name it "index.htm"

If that won't upload then at least you can eliminate the contents of your file as a possible cause.

20

Gaming / Re: Nintendo Leak: The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past on Game Boy

« on: February 17, 2021, 03:21:20 pm »

Nintendo Power 44 had some screenshots of this prototype. The mini map is on the left and there's a good shot of the entrance to Eastern Palace too.

21

Maps In Progress / Re: My mapping projects

« on: December 31, 2020, 09:12:17 pm »

Plans for 2021

Double Dragon (Atari 2600)
Double Dragon (Atari 7400)
Double Dragon (Commodore 64) (Binary Designs version)
Double Dragon (Commodore 64) (Ocean version)
Double Dragon (Genesis)
The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Space Mutants (Game Gear)
The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Space Mutants (Genesis)

22

Maps Of The Month / Re: 2020/06: Lunar: Sanposuru Gakuen (J) (Game Gear) - zagato blackfist

« on: June 02, 2020, 12:41:12 am »

Thanks for featuring this. Amusingly, the town was a lot harder to map than the Coastal Cavern or Demon Castle D just because there were so many rooms and doors to deal with. First time I ever had to resort to using symbols after using every letter in the alphabet.

23

Map Gab / Re: Super NES Classic Edition - full map set

« on: April 21, 2020, 12:01:32 am »

Do you intend to rip the backgrounds for Star Fox 2? I'm willing to do the same thing I did with the first game, but if you've already started i'll leave it alone.

Getting all the stage backgrounds except for the Secret Base will take less than an hour. Getting the Secret Base might take me a few days because i'd have to find all the Pepper Coins and i'm not very good at this game.

24

Map Gab / Re: Looking for things visible only by zooming out (like zelda dungeon swatiska)

« on: April 12, 2020, 11:31:56 am »

When I was mapping Inindo: Way of the Ninja for the SNES I found some kanji in one of the towns. It's in Mikawa Castle, in a place you can't get to without cheat codes. The name "三上" is written in the lake using land tiles and I think is says "Mikami"

It's big enough that you would have to zoom out to fit both characters on your screen at the same time.

25

Maps In Progress / Re: My mapping projects

« on: April 22, 2019, 12:11:21 pm »

I finished Magic Knight Rayearth and sent in the maps. There was a bug in the emulator that caused some backgrounds to not display right, usually water backgrounds. It wouldn't screw the whole map, just the bottom right corner. The good news is that i was able to fix most of these maps by making transparency layers and fixing the water separately. The bad news is the Crimson Underpass still looks pretty bad and there's nothing I can do about it. The ground itself is mangled in the corner and it's not something where I can just copy the good part and smooth it over.

I'll have to leave it for now. Hopefully i'll be able to do something about it eventually.

26

Map Requests / Re: One request…

« on: April 06, 2019, 01:46:38 pm »

Would map coordinates help? You can change your position in the memory editor and refresh the screen by going into the menu with this.

612B Horizontal (16 steps)
612C Vertical (16 steps)

612D Horizontal (1 step)
612E Vertical (1 step)

27

Mapping Tips/Guides / Re: Trying to create camera/position control cheat

« on: March 27, 2019, 02:43:23 pm »

Try these. I nabbed some position axis codes from VBA's memory editor.

01??5FC1 This is the horizontal axis code. Better to just change the value in the memory editor (C15F) as you need to. 00 is the far left of the screen and FF is the right. You should be able to get inside of walls with this.

01??66C1 This is the vertical axis. I see what you mean by fall damage, but if you enter this as a gameshark code and set the value to 00 you can float at the top of the screen, and move left or right as you wish. This is C166 in the memory editor.

28

Maps Of The Month / Re: 2019/03: Inindo: Way Of The Ninja (Super NES) - zagato blackfist

« on: February 28, 2019, 11:35:34 pm »

This is the game that got me into mapping in the first place. I've had a physical copy of it since the 90's, and when this site was created I thought I might finally see some maps. I watched the front page for a few years, then came to realize that if I ever wanted maps of this game I would have to make them myself. I sat down with ZSNES, didn't know what I was doing, but after about an hour I produced a very crude Password Dungeon map. I moved on to other games when this was done, but the old maps weren't quite up to the quality standards of vgmaps so this update was on my agenda for years.

I had to hack my way into Omi Castle using codes. It doesn't have an icon on the world map because you're supposed to go to Azuchi Castle instead. It looks like the programmer must have put that blank map there as a placeholder, so that Omi gets counted during the war planning screen at the end of the month. Whatever the reason, it was something i've never seen before in this game, so that was pretty cool.

29

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

« on: August 28, 2018, 12:55:55 am »

It sounds like a lot of work, but this is probably the easiest and least confusing way to map a game. One thing you need to keep in mind while taking your screenshots is how you are going to stitch them together later. A screenshot goes to waste if you can't remember where it goes.

Try to get something that's easy to see in every screenshot, so you can "stitch by landmark" by having these objects overlap when you paste them onto the map. An example of landmark stitching might be like finding a town in Dragon Warrior, and taking 4 screenshots with that town in each corner of the screen. That way you know for certain what goes where.

Also a good idea to only take 20 screenshots at a time if you're working on a BIG map so you don't lose track of what you're doing.

30

Maps In Progress / Re: My mapping projects

« on: March 23, 2018, 09:23:54 pm »

I just submitted everything that was ready to go for Magic Knight Rayearth. It covers about the first 1/3 of the game.

It looks like Yabause doesn't handle the water graphics very well. I had to leave some effects out of the Great Whirlpool where the sun was hitting the water, and some of the rooms in the Eternal Ice Cave were so bad I had to swap the water out with the water from other rooms. I've played through the whole game and know there's at least a few more places where i'll have to replace water backgrounds.

I spent a long time thinking about what to do with all the chests and hidden items. Since everything in this game has it's own icon I just put the treasures on little white cards so all of the hidden Rainbow Amulets would be easier to see.