nesdev.parodius.com

Celius · Posted: Fri Jul 29, 2005 11:15 pm Post subject:

Yeah, I'm going to make a Qbasic program that makes a large map, and updates it 1 line of tiles at a time. I just really hope I can make it output stuff on the NES. Even if it's not what I expect, I still want it to put stuff on the screen. This is the longest forum i've ever seen. yeah, the reason I was wondering how to load a chr file into Qbasic was because I want to have it act like NSA, but better. I want to find out if there's a way to have qbasic react to mouse movement. That's what I hate about DOS.

Celius · Posted: Fri Jul 29, 2005 11:18 pm Post subject:

By the way, what Tile editor was written in Qbasic?

Guest · Posted: Fri Jul 29, 2005 11:50 pm Post subject:

Celius · Posted: Sat Jul 30, 2005 5:09 pm Post subject:

I just found out a really easy way to rip graphics. I think it may require Nesticle, due to its PCX snapshot thing. Take a snapshot, open it in photoshop, copy and paste it into paint, and save it as a .bmp file. Then open YY-Chr, and copy and paste the stuff from paint into YY-Chr. Make sure that there's only 4 colors in the bmp, and make sure they are the following:

Red
Green
Blue
Black

When you copy and paste it, whatever's Red will show up as the 4th color on the pallete, whatever's Blue will show up as the second, whatever's Green will show up as the the third, and Black will be the first. I'm sure you all knew that, but I just thought I might share it just in case. I'm sure different rules apply for different systems. But that one for sure works with windows.

Quietust · Joined: 19 Sep 2004 Posts: 1028

There's an even easier method - use a tile editor that supports opening multiple files (such as Tile Layer Pro) and just drag-and-drop the tiles from one file to the other. This has the added bonus of being able to load tiles from ANYWHERE in the game, not just the ones that happened to be loaded at the time you took the screenshot.

The only caveat is that this method generally doesn't work with games that use CHR-RAM (since their tile data will likely be compressed somewhat).

Celius · Posted: Sat Jul 30, 2005 5:24 pm Post subject:

Well, you can do that even in YY-Chr. I shouldn't have said ripping graphics is made easier by this, I should have said, if you want something you see on the screen in a chr file, do that method.

tepples · Posted: Sat Jul 30, 2005 7:51 pm Post subject:

Celius · Posted: Sat Jul 30, 2005 8:12 pm Post subject:

Yeah, I just think that it's easier to copy and paste graphics from paint into a chr editor right away, instead of going into command prompt, and doing all that crap.

tepples · Posted: Sat Jul 30, 2005 8:37 pm Post subject:

True, but the command prompt is more scriptable. Have you ever read the GNU Make manual? If you keep the graphics in a .bmp file, which some claim is the most convenient format for making modifications, you can have your makefile automatically rebuild the .chr file whenever necessary. Having the grunt work of data conversion handled behind the scenes can simplify larger projects.

Celius · Posted: Sat Jul 30, 2005 8:41 pm Post subject:

You know, Jnes and VirtuaNes seem to skip a line of tiles. Am I right? FCEUXD (AWESOME EMULATOR!) and Nintendulator(ALSO AWESOME!) are the only ones I know of that don't. If I write my code like this:

Celius · Posted: Sat Jul 30, 2005 8:45 pm Post subject:

Oh, by the way, that method you see above of loading a BG is quite reliable, it seems. So yay! I found a reliable method! thanks to the hello.asm code for NESASM, there are probably a bunch, but oh well.

Disch · Joined: 10 Nov 2004 Posts: 1587

Do you have scanline clipping turned off? The NES renders 240 scanlines, but when emulating NTSC, most emulators chop off the top and bottom 8 scanlines (only rendering 224 scanlines) since the top and bottom are chopped off on most NTSC displays.

If one emu is chopping off the top 8 lines, and another isn't, it may appear that one is rendering the image lower than the other -- when it really isn't. One just isn't showing the whole picture.

Your code is drawing to ppu$2020, so without clipping, this will start drawing 8 pixels down from the top of ths screen. With clipping it will start at the very top of the screen.

Celius · Posted: Sat Jul 30, 2005 9:00 pm Post subject:

Yeah, why would you want clipping? I'm sure there's a reason for it, but I think it's dumb.

Disch · Joined: 10 Nov 2004 Posts: 1587

As stated -- most NTSC displays cut off the top and bottom of the screen. As such, Some games expected that area to not be visible and there's sometimes trash up there which clipping hides. Can't think of a game offhand which does that, but I know they exist. Also, look at Final Fantasy without clipping. Scroll the screen virtically -- see that effect at the top and bottom? That's an unavoidable problem with Virtical Scrolling + Vertical mirroring. However clipping hides it nicely.

Another possible benefit of clipping is that it brings the screen a little closer to 4:3 aspect ratio (though it's still pretty far from it). So all the people that like stretching the image to fit the screen will have less distortion than they would if all 240 lines were rendered.

So yeah, I'm pro-clipping -- though most/all emus make it optional so it's easy to flip off if you don't like it.