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Wow, that's awesome news!

I gave it a try, and while it's gonna be a while before all the bells and whistles get added, it's pretty solid already. It worked without any problems on my Linux Mint machine, so that's a big plus.

The enhancement engine looks very promising as well. It wouldn't be terribly useful for mapping as you said, but nonetheless really fun for normal play. It'll be awesome seeing the eventual enhanced versions of FF6 and EarthBound, for instance.

Thank you so much, Jon, for making it possible for all of us to contribute to this amazing internet project you began so long ago. And I'm happy to have been a helping hand in reaching the 50,000 milestone.

It's been a lot of fun viewing all of these "windows" into the state of the website these past few weeks.

And wow, I definitely wasn't expecting to be the fifth most active contributor on VGMaps! Have I really done that much?!

[Sansara Naga 2]

Is it just me, or is everyone experiencing 2 minute wait times to load one page on the VGMaps forums? It took me something like 15 minutes just to get to point of posting this message.

In other news, Sansara Naga 2 is in the works.

Looks great, mechaskrom! I'm happy you enjoyed playing Crater to the point of wanting to map it.

Did you use Tiled to do the maps? If not, well, give it a go. It helps cut down time.

Using Tiled would've taken 10 to 20 times longer than just taking 30 seconds to a minute to clean up each room. I used Tiled for the very first room, then I switched straight away to screenshots because it took way too long. All the tiles don't fit into a neat 18 x 24 grid since there're tiles that sit halfway between those grid lines in pretty much all the rooms. While Tiled is great for a ton of other games, it's a bad fit with how ElecHead is constructed.

[ElecHead]

A new year has come and I bring with me a new map set!

For a little change of pace, I decided to try mapping a more modern game instead of the SNES stuff I usually gravitate toward, so here's the PC game ElecHead. Given how the graphics are fairly NES-like, it wasn't too difficult stitching rooms together. The main annoyance was getting rid of the particle effects that were present in nearly all the rooms. The rooms with stars had me taking twice as many screenshots just so I wouldn't accidently erase a star I had thought was a stray particle.

I'm fairly certain I didn't forget any rooms, but if I did, I'm sure the ElecHead fans will let me know.

I'll probably try to merge all the stages into a single image some time just for the fun of it. Hopefully 32 GB of RAM should be enough to make that happen, haha. 

Since I've mapped this game, I've been thinking of taking on Nama Takahashi's most recent game Öoo as well, but that'll be something to do later down the road.

That is such a cool project! There is something incredibly satisfying about coding for MS-DOS—it's like the ultimate "back to basics" challenge. Using Sokoban as a stepping stone toward a JRPG is actually a brilliant move. It forces you to master the core logic of tile-based movement, collision detection, and level loading, which is exactly the foundation you'll need for those top-down town and dungeon maps later on.

That's all well and good, but have you played the game?

You got the heart to stand your ground, bud. And it's very noble you did.

Honestly, I'm really not all that concerned over my maps being over there. I'm being attributed properly, for one thing. And once my maps are up online, I have no control over where they may end up. There have been a number of people who have asked permission for hosting my maps on their websites over the years, but even if they had not asked but still properly credited, I'm still fine with that.

I was just curious what the response would be, and I was not at all surprised a clanker was used even for e-mail correspondence, given the nature of everything else on that site.

Oh yes, some of us are very familiar with that website. Yes, it's unauthorized and no one was asked beforehand to have any of our maps put up there.

I think Jon brought it to my attention about two years ago, since so many of my maps were present over there. I eventually e-mailed whoever owns that site to have my maps taken down, but I just got an AI response asking for all my real world details to determine whether I was the "legitimate copyright holder". Obviously I wasn't gonna give all that away to who knows who (especially someone hiding behind a clanker), so while unfortunate, we just have to live with that website existing.

But I have the hope that most people who happen to find their way there would see through the highly polished facade it puts up and recognize that the true source of the content comes from this place (which has been around FAR longer), complete with its human, hand coded jankiness.

[Download link: Crater VGA Version 1.0]

At long last, Crater is finally finished!

Download link: Crater VGA Version 1.0

After over two years of working on and off on this thing, I'm so happy it's done and I can move on to my next game project.

I hope anyone who's interested in my humble rendition of a classic puzzle game enjoys their time with it. 

I'm new to these forums, but what I do know is that FlyingArmor does great maps, especially for RPGs.

Is Ultima: Warriors Of Destiny (NES) one of those current projects?

Welcome to the VGMaps forum, RetroidPrimeX! And thanks for the kind words.

I work on it on and off whenever it strikes me to. If I had a way of walking through obstacles and over water, the mapping process would've been done a long time ago. I had a heck of a time just trying to freeze the water animations, nevermind anything else.

Maybe you could try asking ChatGPT or Gemini for help then?

Is anybody gonna rip the maps from the Looney Tunes games?

In the 8 or 9 years since your last post here, you could've easily mapped most of those games yourself if you wanted them that badly. A little bit of hard work each day goes a long way.

As for Ultima: Warriors Of Destiny, i'm going to leave that alone for now just in case FlyingArmor wants it.

*Just seeing this now* I have been mapping it on and off for the past year or so, so it is in the works!

Thanks for the kind words, YelseyKing!

I suppose it can be categorized as an action puzzle game. The "story" can be summarized in the following two sentences (taken from the manual): "Sometime in the future, robots attempt to take over human settlements on various planets. Your goal is to infiltrate these settlements and destroy all of the robots." So it's up to you to find various items scattered throughout each settlement and use them along with objects like chairs and crates to figure out ways of destroying the malicious robots without getting yourself killed in the process.

David Murray did a fantastic job of using the text characters from the PET to create such cool looking environments. You can more or less tell what everything's meant to be from just a glance. While the later ports pretty up the graphics to various extents, the original PET version still can hold its own.

If you'd like to know more about it, you can check out David's channel on Youtube: The 8-Bit Guy. He put out a number of videos dedicated to the development of this game.