Recent Posts

21

Map Requests / Re: List of unmapped NES games

« Last post by dark_lord_zagato on August 24, 2025, 10:38:00 am »

To be clear, I am not going to complain if somebody sends in a map set that I was planning to do myself. I would like it if more NES maps started coming in from other people.

That said, there are a few games i've checked out and decided to set aside for now...

American Gladiators is difficult to control on the NES.

3D World Runner will require drawn maps, but I have almost no experience playing this game.

Ultimate Air Combat has a lot of big maps with monotonous scenery. I think this would be better suited for mappers who have experience using scripts, or maybe an auto stitcher. If anyone wants this i've already made some codes for mapping purposes and will post them below.

Zanac has LONG maps, and will need to be broken up in pieces. Also tons of repeating, monotonous scenery. Maybe another auto stitcher project.

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure I only mapped one road from the first medieval stage before putting it down. I estimate these maps will be 12,000x6,000 pixels in size, but more importantly I need to find better codes for boundary breaking before I continue.

Miracle Piano By looking at BizHawk's hex editor, I can see where the game handles inputs from the midi keyboard, but my efforts to play this game by manually controlling the inputs from the hex editor were unsuccessful. I heard this game has a side scrolling platform type of minigame. To the best of my knowledge there are no emulators that support the keyboard this game came with.


Ultimate Air Combat [NES] (Always use "system bus" memory domain)

020A:09 Infinite Bombs
0216:FF Skip Air Stages
0242:CB Infinite Fuel
0341:00 Invincible
05B3:00 No Targets Left


Also, Dash Galaxy In The Alien Asylum and Niji no Silkroad were mapped by Ricardo Sallin and removed from the list.

22

Map Requests / Re: List of unmapped NES games

« Last post by JonLeung on August 24, 2025, 08:41:28 am »

zagato, you've been doing a great job so far, and keep it up if you can, but are there any particular NES games that you foresee that you might have difficulties mapping, or any games or genres you'd rather not tackle?

I'd really like to see all the NES games mapped eventually, obviously sooner rather than later, but there are still many to go, and, while your prolificness is commendable, I wonder if it might make other people hesitate to map NES games too... maybe?

If there are some you'd rather have someone else do, or are questioning how you might do them, maybe some discussion of it here will give you ideas, or let other people take on certain ones if they would like.

That's not at all a negative comment on your skill, of course not, as you do exceptional work, but as we all know, there are still hundreds of games, and I'm sure you could use a hand based on quantity alone, if we're to get a full NES atlas anytime soon.

You already have suggested that FlyingArmor take on Ultima: Warriors Of Destiny, are there any others you wouldn't mind others tackling?

Maybe someone has an idea how to map Miracle Piano Teaching System (due to having to emulate its controls and what would be worth mapping), Star Voyager (3D space, if you want to map more than just HUDs and other scenes) and Elite (European exclusive, similar to Star Voyager).

In any case, I'm always happy to have more discussion about how this is progressing.

I'm sure it's not possible to have every NES game mapped by the 40th anniversary of the NES (in under two months!), but would the 45th anniversary of the NES be possible?

23

Map Gab / Purrfect Collection is Nigh, and a bit more

« Last post by Cyartog959 on August 23, 2025, 01:18:30 pm »

Just a heads-up, but, the long-anticipated Bubsy Purrfect Collection is just days away, and I for one am thrilled to see it coming!

It's a joy to see just about every game from Bubsy's past come back to the hands of fans once again, and that's including the rather obscure Jaguar game, "Fractured Furry Tales", and the infamous installment, Bubsy 3D, but the game's getting new improvements to ensure there's no direct repeat of why it went down as one of its badly-received 3D games in gaming history(and I don't blame that not much couldn't be fine tuned in time for its launch at that time).

A bit to relate on Bubsy 3D, it's getting a somewhat sequel, and the name may kinda sound like an April Fools joke, but believe me, it sure is not; "Bubsy 4D", made by an indie studio, Fabraz, and published by Atari.

Its story centers on Bubsy facing, once again, the Woolies, up to stealing yarnballs and Bubsy's Golden Fleece again, the very item Bubsy took back from the end of "The Woolies Strike Back", but this time, they're absconding the flocks of sheep on his planet to force them to steal it. However, they underestimated the sheep, because they revolted against them and are attempting to fight back the Woolies by building their own weapons, the "Baabots", to steal away the Fleece for themselves. Once again, its up to Bubsy to step in and save the Golden Fleece and his planet from their madness, but doing so won't be easier for him this time, because he's got two enemies in their newly-formed two-front war between them.

Needless to say, Bubsy's got a few new tricks up his sleeve for that game(alongside minor cosmetics, including the model from Bubsy 3D), including one ability to become a rolling hairball... sorta. In fact, that strongly reminds me of how Homer Simpson did his "Homer Ball", the power that can turn into a big ball of flab, from "The Simpsons Game", only Bubsy's weighing far less than everybody's favorite goofy, albeit notably rotund, but family protective and good-hearted, family man.

The newest Bubsy game's level amount is, well, once more, going to have 3 different planets, each having 5 levels, for a total of 15 levels, and, to guess right, new bosses are fought in the end of each planet's final level.

I think many of Bubsy's games' amounts on their worlds, levels, and bosses may need to be stepped up beyond that said repeated amounts.

If anyone asks, I wasn't too fond of "Paws on Fire" because the unnecessarily placed Bit Trip rhythm-based gameplay doesn't really suit the bobcat, me, and plenty of others, quite well. Sure, it was neat to take down Oinker P. Hamm again, and it was nice to see many of the characters from Bubsy II and the Bubsy TV pilot show up in the game, but I still felt that kind of rhythm-based gameplay should've been kept out in that.

While I do enjoy Bubsy's adventures, and I know that its not so bad to slightly experiment a bit differently now and then(but not far too much that can deviate away from its true roots), I still would've felt they were quite more in-line with its past 2D games, in hi-bit format, because, well, so many people grew up playing them, and Atari's present CEO, Wade Ross, thinks and believes that, to quote "the last thing anyone wants is a really generic platformer".

Really? "Generic"? In Bubsy's games? The majority of our gaming audience grew up playing and making 2D games, before and after Bubsy was made, and many still do today, because as long as imaginations sticks around, and great creative spirits are within us, NOTHING is ever completely generic in 2D games! I still love them! It all only depends on keeping them coherent to their original vision and their teams working well and in-line, too. I think his tastes on 2D games are quite off-kilter, as others', so far.

And, so far, there's not yet a 2D Bubsy game that had its levels made longer and larger than the past games' maps. The basic tech used to make them has increased greatly, so why not go for it?

Nevertheless, for those willing to get back to Bubsy's past adventures, they're probably gonna feel a bit rusty on level route memorization, and the games' maps are still yet to be charted.

24

Maps In Progress / Super Metroid cool map

« Last post by Cleeem on August 20, 2025, 06:11:40 am »

Hello ! 
I share here a map I made for Super Metroid (Snes).

Thanks to MFreak, it is possible to play with a far more interactive map, with items only marked when you have not taken them yet. Very useful for backtracking. There is also map decoration on it.

Here is the map I made :
https://mega.nz/file/q1QxFLKA#Yxciarn-fZWjsEBFAib9oIM9kz0-Z1IkwHPLODwq-SE

Here is the patch of MFreak :
https://metroidconstruction.com/resource.php?id=528

25

VGMaps Social Board / More Kokopolo Images

« Last post by Cyartog959 on August 17, 2025, 02:21:42 am »

I was able to find images about the first Kokopolo game that had Developer Diaries covers from NGamer's magazines through the months, from Oct 2008 to Apr 2009, before it became a DSiWare game, and then its post-launch article in Sep 2011 after its launch. They have W.I.P. screenshots, stage layouts, complete with placeholder tilesets, and sprites of the game at the time, and many of Keith's interviews printed in them.

If you look a bit closely on the 4th Developer Diary at the bottom-right of the image, you'll find a potential box cover of the game when it was targeted for DS in physical, with Kokopolo in it. That exact cover would be updated twice, the first time to remove the whiskers and accommodate the DSiWare addition, and the second time to reflect his recognizable design and added Jinbe in it for the 3DS re-release(still not seeing Tatsumo in it, though).

Take a look at them.













There's even artwork about All-Gen Gamers featuring Kokopolo's characters Keith made as tribute to it.

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Map Requests / Re: Full map set for Sonic the Hedgehog's games

« Last post by G.E.R. on August 15, 2025, 02:41:36 am »

A robofish in one expocenter of robotics in Moscow, it look like enemy from forest-theme zones.

27

Gaming / Re: About "Hatch Tales"...

« Last post by Cyartog959 on August 15, 2025, 02:29:52 am »

Ever wonder why some games flop despite talented developers? I think it's because the vision isn't clear or cohesive. I once worked on a project where everyone had different ideas, and the final product was a mess.

Ooh... Sorry you went through some chaotic disorganization for that project. Guess they didn't follow some order and organized control on its vision through its development process. I could guess a few factors that contributed, such as scope-creeping, if its a game, but what else is new?

From my familiar experience in waiting too long to see Hatch Tales finished after all this time, its director delayed it so many times after diverting focus away from its development and put its development process into complete disorganization. It upset many backers after donating their pledges during its KickStarter campaign and gave up hope waiting for it to be released in disappointment.

It was meant to be a redoing of "Chicken Wiggle", the 3DS original game(not that the game ever needed one a short time after its launch), complete with extra bonus levels, even with its own theme, and a new campaign featuring Holly and Max, from Mutant Mudds, having his own adventure, too, that was ALL PROMISED for its launch, but Jools, its director, pulled EVERYTHING from it all, and STARTED OVER by axing EVERYTHING he and his hired contractors worked on and off for long, and making it just about Hatch trekking through Talonreach to stop Nazar's chilling ambitions for the kingdom, and leaving only most of Chicken Wiggle itself as its only hidden unlockable.

If anything, a game director IS responsible for managing organization and keeping game development well in order, retain any game project's coherency to its original vision, make sure the team/teams stay in-line to ensure its completion, and try their very best to minimize delay, unless necessary, not for excuse-making reasons, especially if it gets backed through a crowd-funding campaign and cannot disappoint backers that pledged to it.

I feel your kind of disappointment, pal, about the chaos you went through. If Jools continues that kind of chaotic disorganization for his game dev line of work, I worry of how he could maintain goodwill to the fans of his games, as others.

28

Map Requests / Re: JonLeung's Requests

« Last post by JonLeung on August 13, 2025, 09:48:17 pm »

Okay, I got around to finishing Beyond Shadowgate (PC).

I'm not sure if I want to do a "marked" version, but to make up for that () if I don't ever do that, even though it's maybe more work, is that I made a version showing all the possible variations of all the screens in the game.  Maybe I need to come up with a better term than "Screens", but that's how I referred to them in zagato blackfist's submissions for the NES games Shadowgate, Deja Vu, and Uninvited (which inspired me to get all of those screens) as well as many other games, especially on the NES page...

Yeah, we're talking about over 1700 variations, yikes.

If a room has a single item in it that can be taken, there's two: one with the item there and one with it taken.  If there's a door that might be open or closed, that doubles it again.  For most rooms there aren't too many combinations.  But for some, there can be multiple items or multiple states, leading to exponential numbers of possibilities.  I tried to map them all as much as I could!

Believe it or not, I captured most of them in my playthroughs.  Since items can't be put down after they've been picked up (unless being used) and almost all doors can't be closed after they've been opened, it required a lot of saving and loading to be able to get the various combinations.  While I thought I was pretty good at getting all the combinations that I knew of per room, I kept finding stuff that I missed, like how the Wraith can appear in most rooms in the first half of Castle Shadowgate.  In this and a few other instances, mechaskrom's paint.net plugin that he made when I asked about comparing pixels made it easy to isolate differences (in cases where I couldn't just copy and paste rectangular or simple shapes), and from there, to copy over the right pixels to create combinations that I know are possible in the game, even if I hadn't actually done them in-game.  If the game didn't have such a rigid save system, it would be a lot easier...

Here's one example of many combinations for a single room.


And in yet another room in Themiere Mansion, there's a clock, and there are way too many combinations with that, so I just included images of what all the 16 possible clock faces could be - I wasn't going to multiply the already numerous screens by 16!  And there are lots of skeleton death images there because while most monsters in the game that jump at you and kill you have the decency to cover up many of the variables in the room, this skeleton doesn't block the door (with three states) or the clock (with four states), so it appears 12 times!


Yeah, there are a LOT of ways to die in this game, so I marked deaths (and impending deaths) in red.

If you actually use these when playing, you might find them upside-down at first glance.  That is, earlier rooms are shown at the bottom and later rooms are shown at the tops of these images.  That's because this game moves from "south" to "north".  So it generally works, except for the cursed Themiere Mansion (once again), where the basement/dungeon areas appear above the second floor, since you do go to the second floor before you go to the basement.  But these are just showing combinations, if you want to find your way around, referring to the actual map with room connections makes more sense.

I can't believe it's mid-August, as this game came out last September.  Sheesh!  I enjoyed putting it together, and it was a good reminder of how much work even simple maps can be, but man, I got other projects to do! 

29

Gaming / The Legend Of Zelda is 33⅓ years old today!

« Last post by JonLeung on August 13, 2025, 09:13:17 am »

Today, The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past is 33⅓ years old (in North America); that's ⅓ of a century!
It's the third game in one of Nintendo's top three franchises and "three" is often used in the series: the Triforce, number of goddesses, and main characters, among others.
Happy 33.333...rd!
Feeling old yet?

30

Map Requests / Re: Brave Fencer Musashi

« Last post by VGCartography on August 13, 2025, 06:50:04 am »

I plan to give this one a try at some point, I did a test with Duckstation 3D screenshots and it seemed to come out pretty well. I think doing isometric 3d maps should be doable.