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.

[612B]

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)

[01??5FC1]

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.

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.

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.

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.

Magic Knight Rayearth on Saturn just became plausible. I got Yabause up and running and i've finally made some position modifier codes to get into inaccessible areas.

060FDB4C ????      Horizantal Axis Position
060FDB50 ????      Vertical Axis Position

This is going to be my new long term project. If I can figure out how to deal with the Forest of Silence, which is a repeating maze much like the Lost Woods, I should be in good shape.

Edit: I found a good way to map the Forest of Silence. All I have to do is walk around in the black area, which is normally off limits, and I don't have to worry about the game warping me all over the place.

I have some stuff in the works, though for now I have to break in a new computer and figure out how to use some new emulators. On the plus side, it looks like the number of new submissions has been picking up again, especially with all the arcade maps coming in.

Your Super Ghouls N' Ghosts maps were a nice surprise. I'm quite familiar with how challenging that game is, and how elaborate the backgrounds are.

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.

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.

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.

[swear]

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.

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.

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.

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.