Topic: Robowarrior - NES

[jwurmz]

here, this is an editor i made a while back: http://jwurmz.cinnamonpirate.com/pub/RoboWarriorEditor.zip



to use it, rename your RoboWarrior ROM to RoboWarrior.nes and place it into the same directory as the binary. the level editor doesn't read the tile values directly from the ROM; rather, they are all screen caputured bitmaps (stored in the \media directory) with custom bitmap tiles that indicate the item hidden below. the editor only has the 'visual scheme' from the 1st level so it's not much help for your purposes now that i think of it; it works for hacking the levels though



in case you wanted to hack the data yourself, here are notes on everything: http://jwurmz.cinnamonpirate.com/pub/RoboWarrior.txt



someone could make a mapviewer utility with this info that reads directly from the ROM...

[majax79]

Just wanted to update that it's pretty impossible to make maps of this game because the items generate in different places each time you play it. Oh well.

Quick question, how could I view the invisible fruit or secrets on Adventure Island I? I'm using the latest interim version of FCEUX currently.

[DarkWolf]

I still posted the King's Bounty maps for Genesis even though the chests and items are randomized for each game.  The maps are still useful.

[TerraEsperZ]

Heck, I prefer maps that look good to maps to that are useful but ugly. Unless you have good hacking skills, your best bet is to use a (hopefully complete) FAQ or walkthrough to try and get everything but sometimes that's not enough. I had to find some secrets in Treasure Master by myself since there was very little information available for the game anywhere online. At any rate, do the maps anyway, we never get enough .

[majax79]

I would be more than happy to do maps for some games but I need the knowledge to do so.


I think the easiest map for me to start would be Day Dreamin' Davey. I don't know how everyone has learned to create maps. I would submit that if a detailed guide existed, with the use of FCEUX, that much more maps would be created. My topic has 1,100 views so imagine if just 5 of those people began helping.

[Maxim]

It's really not that complicated, just labour intensive. Play the game, take a screenshot, move the screen along a bit, take another screenshot. Now use an image editor to join the two screenshots together and edit out repeated sprites. Not too hard.

Then repeat until the whole level is done. There's the labour intensive part.

[majax79]

It's not that complicated for you people because you've been doing it for a while. For others that happen to come across this site and want to contribute, it might not be.

Like I said it seems like common logic that if an in-depth tutorial was done more people would create maps and that would be more productive. Since there's 677 licensed NES games that were released in the U.S. I would think you'd welcome all the help you could get to expand the selection.

[Maxim]

There is (virtually) no more depth than that. I guess a tutorial showing it all end-to-end might help, but people have different ways of doing things to get the same effect, so there's no one correct way.

[TerraEsperZ]

The thing is, you can't really make a universal tutorial that would cover everything, even if you constrain yourself to only using FCEUX. Not all games work the same way, and some have peculiarities that require special actions to properly map them; things like animated tiles, shifting color palettes, unreachable area, background tiles that are not fully on screen, finding the exact starting point of moving sprites, etc.

(This should really be in the Mapping Tips/Guides forum)

We can try and give you some tips and tools, but as in all things, experience is the best teacher. Your first few maps will probably be terrible and most likely riddled with errors. That's okay though, we all started there.

Okay, let's start with, in my opinion, the very basics. In FCEUX, you can enable/disable both the sprite layer and the background layer (though I don't remember the default keyboard shortcut for it). By default, removing the background leaves only black, and since black is used on most sprites, that makes it impossible to accurately "cut them out". To remedy to that, edit the fceux.cfg file in your FCEUX directory, search for the string "gNoBGFillColor" and change the 3 digits number after it to "100". This will change the overscan color (that is, the color displayed when there's no color specified such as when you disable the background) to a lovely pink.

(And if you're unlucky enough the sprites you want to capture feature the same pink color, then play around with the number in the config file)

Hopefully, you understood the procedure I just gave you. If not, there is likely no tutorial complete enough to help you and you'll just have to try it alone for a while to get some experience.

[majax79]

I agree that the thread has gotten off topic. This is my last post on this thread and from now on I'll post in the proper forum. I'm coming into some money in three weeks so perhaps I'll commission a broad guide to mapping.