Messages

61

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

« on: May 10, 2017, 12:30:57 am »

I remember what things were like before vgmaps. Always looking for maps and never finding anything, except maybe hand drawn maps or compressed jpg maps with sprites and seam lines. If it wasn't featured in Nintendo Power and didn't have it's own player's guide a game would basically have no maps anywhere. Tough luck if you're a fan of some obscure game...

As far as saturation goes there's still a lot of work to be done for systems other than NES and SNES. There's a ton of PS1 games i'd like to see mapped someday, and maybe some Saturn games. Problems with 3D aside there's still enough 2D games for these systems.

62

Maps In Progress / Re: My mapping projects

« on: May 10, 2017, 12:04:44 am »

Extras from Zombie Hunter. I found out how to change the background colors into one solid color while I was mapping so I made a sprite sheet.

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Maps In Progress / Re: Nosferatu (SNES) Mapping

« on: March 07, 2017, 08:06:07 pm »

Hi Robert. If you're looking to get into places that are inaccessible during normal gameplay there are a few things you can try.

Making position modifier codes will usually do the trick. You just need an emulator with a code engine. Start your search, jump, and select less than previous value. Then fall back down and select greater than last value. Keep doing this until you have it narrowed down to a few possible codes. I've drawn a crude graph to illustrate where on the screen you can expect to find your character.



The great thing about axis position modifier codes is that if you get a vertical code you can set the value high, at say 10, and float in the air over anything that would distract you from mapping. I've already made Nosferatu codes for this. Screen orientation moves the screen itself. Player position moves your character. x256 pixels moves you an entire screen.

7E0069??   Horizontal Screen Orientation
7E006A??   Horizontal Screen Orientation x256
7E006B??   Vertical Screen Orientation
7E006C??   Vertical Screen Orientation x256
7E006D??   Horizontal Player Position
7E006E??   Horizontal Player Position x256
7E006F??   Vertical Player Position
7E0070??   Vertical Player Position x256


The hacking utility vSNES can also help you out sometimes. You can load up your savestate and pull map data out of it. It can disable layers and change the default background color to make ripping graphics easier. It can also flatten out a screen by killing the mode7 graphics. Depending on which game you're playing you might be able to take gigantic screenshots with it too.

http://www.zophar.net/utilities/snesutil/vsnes.html

Hope this helps.

64

Maps Of The Month / Re: 2017/03: The Legend Of Zelda (NES) - Rick Bruns

« on: February 28, 2017, 11:49:16 pm »

I always thought that Zelda SWF map was a great idea for this particular game. Now I don't have to waste time burning/bombing everything in sight just because I mistakenly swear there's something on this screen.

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Maps In Progress / Re: My mapping projects

« on: February 27, 2017, 02:06:07 pm »

It must just be your workplace filter, the link works just fine over here.

And you're right, i should share with them, the thing is... i've never edited a wiki before. I guess that's one of those things i should really learn how to do.

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Maps In Progress / Re: My mapping projects

« on: February 27, 2017, 12:25:55 pm »

Heh, that's pretty much right. The only two characters in your party at the time are both female and the dojo master insists on having only male students, so you have to find a different teacher after losing this battle.

Still, the fact this item was a guaranteed drop in a fixed battle makes me think the programmers were considering multiple branches to the story at one point and eventually decided against it.

67

Maps In Progress / Re: My mapping projects

« on: February 25, 2017, 10:39:55 pm »

I have something to share now that i'm finishing up Lunar Walking School. The fixed battle in the MAN'S Dungeon can actually be won if you play this on something with a memory editor. Set RAM address C526 and C527 to 00 when you fight Gear and it will go down in one hit. You get an item called "Manliness" which is normally impossible to get, and when you deliver it to the person who asked for it he doesn't even acknowledge that you have it. Oh well.

Doing research on more Beavis and Butt-Head PC games now.

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Maps Of The Month / Re: 2017/01: Crystal Warriors (Game Gear) - zagato blackfist

« on: January 01, 2017, 01:01:30 am »

These games were actually pretty fun to map. I decided to go with strategy guide maps and collect all the enemy stats. For that I needed to cast scan on the enemy units and fix the transparency on their sprites, as they would otherwise completely cover the tiles they stand on. Getting the actual maps put together was the easiest part of this project since most of the work was in the editing. Thanks for choosing this for MotM.

69

Maps In Progress / Re: My mapping projects

« on: October 31, 2016, 04:39:15 pm »

Next up, Magic Knight Rayearth (Game Gear) and Royal Stone (Game Gear).

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Map Gab / Re: Gauntlet [Arcade] - All 125 arcade boards mapped out, plus extras

« on: October 17, 2016, 12:33:12 am »

While I'm still here, does anyone know of any sprite rips for I or II?

Are you specifically looking for sprite rips and not maps? You could always try the spriters resource if that's it.

http://www.spriters-resource.com/nes/gauntlet/
http://www.spriters-resource.com/nes/gauntlet2/

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Maps In Progress / Re: My mapping projects

« on: August 26, 2016, 12:46:42 pm »

New projects.

Beavis and Butt-Head [Genesis]
Beavis and Butt-Head [Game Gear]

I think i might have figured out how to map Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball too. I made some codes that move the guy in the back of the field after he picks up the ball. It's going to be time consuming though, and will probably take a while just to map the Kingdome.

7E0784?? Horizontal Axis
7E0785?? Horizontal Axis x256
7E0786?? Vertical Axis
7E0787?? Vertical Axis x256
7E101E80 Doesn't cut back to batter screen after you pick up the ball, stay on field forever
7E10BC03 Freeze background animation

72

Map Requests / Re: Nintendo Power - 1988-1996 cover games

« on: August 04, 2016, 12:30:23 am »

Panel de Pon starts in the upper right corner so it's the first level that gets changed into, i'm assuming, Yoshi's Island? Nintendo should have left it alone though, i think it would have sold better in the US with it's original graphics. :p

I've been playing around with the Ken Griffey Jr. games lately. I can't achieve freedom of movement in Major League Baseball so there's no progress there yet. The maps in Winning Run can be ripped in one shot with the VSNES hacking tool, which also kills mode7. The only problem here is i'm not sure how many different baseball fields there are yet, or how to get them. So far it looks like two basic maps, each with several small variations.

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Maps Of The Month / Re: 2016/08: Suikoden II (PSX) - mechaskrom

« on: August 02, 2016, 07:51:58 pm »

A well deserved MotM. Great work.

74

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

« on: July 20, 2016, 11:57:34 pm »

Sent in a map of Balloon Trip. As far as I can tell, the first two or three screens, the ones with sparks that are stationary and don't move, are always the same. After that point, when the sparks are moving, all the balloons and sparks are laid down at random.

It's not uncommon to see the same pattern come up again when you reset the game though. As Jon said, I think the game is randomly choosing "parts of screens" while generating the map. I'm not exactly sure how this works but a 4096 pixel map should give a pretty good impression of what this mode looks like.

Also, this would take days without cheating, but if you get the max score and then overflow your points back to 0 your rank drops from 1 all the way back down to 47.

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

« on: July 20, 2016, 01:39:31 am »

I've been doing some hacking and I have reason to believe your Balloon Fight maps that were submitted by Wario Bros. are complete. This seems to be one of those early NES games where the levels keep repeating until the hex value reaches FF and it resets to the first stage. I went past phase 12 and it just kept reusing the maps you already have... except for maybe Bonus-4, which i'll post here.

003B selects the stage out of the ROM. There are only 16 stages in the game, 12 normal and 4 bonus, so this resets to 0 after you clear 0F or Bonus-4. Manually setting this to 10 results in a scrambled screen.

003C is where the game keeps track of your phase number. FF is phase P5, but the game is still choosing out of only 16 phases.

As for the Balloon Trip, 009A is the vertical position address and setting it to 00 floats you up in the menu away from anything that can harm you, so you don't even have to do anything to survive. From what i've heard this map goes on forever. I watched on fast forward until I was down to rank-1 and everything on the screen looked like it was randomly placed so I don't think this can really be mapped.