Topic: "Tom and Jerry: Frantic Antics"

[kiddingfan]

Hey everyone,

I'm a huge fan of a classic game from my childhood, "Tom and Jerry: Frantic Antics" on the Sega Genesis. It's a really fun platformer that I don't see talked about much.

I started a personal project in 2017 to get the full maps for this game. I've been doing it the hard way: taking countless screenshots from an emulator and carefully stitching them together. It's a slow process, but I've managed to finish the maps for Level 2, Level 3, Level 4, and Level 5.

Honestly, getting every pixel right is really tough and takes forever. I know there are incredibly talented people on this forum who are experts at ripping map data directly from the game's files, which is far beyond my technical skill.

I found this amazing forum through the recommendation of an LLM. I'm making this post to share my love for this game and to humbly ask if any of you experts would be interested in helping to create a complete map set. It would be amazing to finally have this great game fully preserved on VGMaps for everyone to see.

I'm more than happy to contribute the maps I've already completed, of course.

Thanks for reading and for any help or advice you can offer!

Cheers
Wenbin

[Cyartog959]

Well, it is really nice to have you in the VGMaps community, and I'm really glad you share the forum's love here! I'm sure you'll enjoy some time hanging out here! Welcome!

And, yes, the process can be oftentimes long, depending on maps' sizes, but, with building endurance and confidence, you'll get the hang of it in no time.

Once you have all the game's maps finished, which is always nice, you can submit the maps to the site so it can be seen in the Atlas very soon.

[mechaskrom]

Welcome to VGMaps.

Nice work on your maps so far, but I really hope that you only used JPEG, a lossy image format, for the attachments. A lossless image format like PNG is preferable for 2D maps to preserve the ripped images. High quality (low compression) JPEG might be okay for images with millions of colors like 3D maps though.

Manually stitching screenshots is something I did in my first mapping project to and it's tedious. One alternative is to try Maxim's autostitcher. It can stitch maps from a lossless video (something the BizHawk emulator can record). Record a video of playing a stage and then feed it to the autostitcher. Results may vary though.
https://www.smspower.org/maxim/Software/ScreenshotAutostitcher

However, I highly recommend looking into lua-scripting with the BizHawk emulator instead. You don't need a lot of programming experience to create scripts that can automate a lot of the stitching.
https://tasvideos.org/BizHawk
https://tasvideos.org/Bizhawk/LuaFunctions

I put together a lua-script for Tom and Jerry that you can use. The layers for the first three stages and the script can be downloaded from here:
https://www.mediafire.com/file/ycugr6or75fl6zs/Tom+Jerry+Frantic+lua+20250805.zip/file

Run the game in BizHawk and then select Tools -> Lua Console and open/run the script in the opened dialog to stitch the current stage. I only tried it on the first three stages, but it seems to work. Before running the script you can configure visible layers in GEN -> Settings. Set 'use custom backdrop color' to true to make it easy to remove transparent sections (magenta) in layers.

Personally I like to script-stitch the main and sprite layers separately and then compose them in an image editor. That way you can remove or move sprites on the maps in an image editor. The sprite layers I ripped are a bit messy and need to be manually reviewed. I hope you at least consider adding non-moving sprites to the maps. Makes them more complete IMO.

Feel free to ask if you have any questions.