Yeah, so I messed up on my promise over two years ago, but seeing Battletoads maps submitted to the site kinda hurt what little pride I have, so I really feel the need to restart this and finally finish it. I'll see about fixing the first post as soon as possible but for now, I'll simply say that I've managed to fully map
Level 11 - Clinger-Winger including accurately mapping all the offscreen areas thanks to some rather clever memory hacking (well, clever for me at least...).
Anyway, here's the full map which I'll comment right after:
You'll notice two things:
1) The upper-left area is finally complete. By searching the memory for changing values while moving vertically, I quickly found the relevant address for the player's vertical position. However, the address being 8-bit (0 to 255) meant that it could not possibly cover the whole range of positions for the map which is 1536 pixels high. So I searched for another value that combined with the first one would make a 16-bit address, which I did by searching for values that changed by 1 whenever the first value went beyond either 00 or FF. Anyway, I found that value and I started playing with both only to discover that whenever I placed the player outside of the screen, the screen wouldn't scroll vertically to center itself on him.
Not being an experienced hacker like Maxim, I had to get around the screen update routine anyway I could. So instead I simply moved the player at the top of the screen but still visible right at the start of the stage, then I let the screen scroll up to it, then moved it again just the right amount until I got to the top of the map. And since the toad kept walking slowly forward without ever reaching the wheel, I finally captured all the missing area that had eluded me until then.
2) Right below the starting point, I previously showed nothing because I simply couldn't reach the area at all. Well, on the finished map I'll still show nothing but for a good reason: as you can see on this image, this is where the map for
Level 13 - Armageddon is located, albeit with the colour palettes of
Level 11. Cool little find right?
