hello.
im starting an assembler class in a few days and am looking forward to seeing what i can do with old nes hardware.
anyway, just wondering what programs are good for creating sprite characters. i downloaded some games with the source code. whare are the sprites located anyway.
Try one of the tile editors here.
http://nesdev.com/#PCGraphics
The graphics for the sprites will be in the CHR file (or whatever someone names it, if they use CHR-RAM). But the actual organization of the tiles (placement, colors) is determined by the program.
Memblers wrote:
the actual organization of the tiles (placement, colors) is determined by the program.
oh so is that why when i open a like smb3 all the tiles are cut up all over the place?
Yep, exactly. And pretty much every 2D game system works like that also (with the exception being various Atari systems).
Open SMB3 in any tile editor that can view 8x16 NES/GBC sprite tiles (
not the old Tile Layer or the internal tile viewer of Nesticle or Nintendulator), and it'll look a little bit less cut-up. Instructions for
8TED:
- Start 8TED.
- Open your ROM.
- Press Right 16 times to skip over the iNES header.
- Press Page Down several times to get to the CHR ROM data.
- Press = to enter 8x16 mode; press - to return to 8x8 mode.
I figure I might as well post on this thread since it's a graphic topic.
I went to the link supplied by Memblers, and grabbed BMP2NES. I'm running into problems, though. When I make a .bmp file, it's at 16 million colors. So I converted it in a program called
Irfanview. Everything looks fine after doing that. Then I run it through BMP2NES. When I do, the image is all broken up and doesn't look right at all. I've tried saving the image in MSPaint as a 256 color (8 bpp) and not converting it in Irfanview. I still get the same effect.
Am I doing something horribly wrong? Is there a better program that I can use to convert .bmp to .chr?
Easy. Get YY-CHR and copy and paste every thing from paint into yy-chr. Make sure you use these colors only, though:
red
blue
green
black
otherwise it won't show up. If you have any other color there it will show up as the bg color. It may be different for mac, but that's the senario with Windows. The same rules apply for bmp2chr. By the way, I'm not saying you're dumb or anything, but if it looks all screwed up, maybe you have incorrect dimensions. Make sure the image is 128x128, no bigger, no smaller, if you're using bmp2chr still after my wonderful advice. haha. Jk.
Yeah, I almost always have trouble converting graphics too. Seems like every converter to CHR has it's own way of dealing with the colors.
YY-CHR is very nice, I haven't tried using it like Celius said, but I bet that'll work well. The way I've had the best luck with converting graphics is by using Tile Molester. Just be sure it goes to the right format, because Tile Molester has a lot of options, heheh.
I also used Irfan Wiew to convert from more colors to 4 colors. It's better to first convert to grayscale mode, then convert to 4 colors step. Inserting it in a CHR file is doable, you don't need BMP2NES at all. I've used TileMolester to instert the new 4 color pitcure into NES format.
Here you are an example :
EDIT :
From this image :
http://jonathan.microclub.ch/cat/minetbougie.jpg, I was able to input it in a NES ROM, it uses MMC5 to do the high CHR adress selection
http://jonathan.microclub.ch/cat/cat.nes
Alright, cool. Thanks for the tips. It was the dimensions afterall. I had them 1x1 too large.
About the colors thing... this is something I've never understood when opening ROMs in a tile editor. Why are they different colors? I used red, green, blue, and black like you said (#FF0000, #00FF00, # 0000FF, and #0000). First off I noticed when converting the image to 256, they seem to change the actual color to a variation of the solid colors. Then the actual colors aren't displayed in the tile editors. It's weird purple colors and what-not.
Sorry about all the questions, I'm so new to this. I figure if I can get some graphics done for a game I'd like to make, that may motivate me to keep persuing it.
EDIT: I saw your post after I made mine, Bregalad. I'll give that a shot in Irfanview. Thanks. Also, the example you meant to post doesn't seem to be there.
Are you using YY-CHR? if you are, you just have to change the default pallete settings. it's always dark green, pine green, wierd purple, and white. Are those the colors you are getting? if they are, just change the pallete colors. I didn't really understand what you were saying.
CHR graphics are 4 colors, and the first of those is transparent. The actual colors used are defined seperately when it's displayed on NES. You can save your palette in the PPU's format with "save palette set file" in YY-CHR.
Okay, yes... those are the four colors I'm getting. I'm using YY CHR. Thanks for the tip on that. My .bmps don't load properly, but as was stated earlier, I can just copy and paste. Awesome!
Now I understand about the colors. So the first one listed on there is the transparent color. So as a general rule of thumb can I just assume that the top-left most color is to be the transparent one? Something I can keep in mind while making the tiles perhaps?
Thanks for all the replies!
Okay, well, actually, they only allow you to use four colors for making sprites and backgrounds, and what you have to remember is that whatever color is first in the pallete is transparent. YY-chr doesn't create the ingame pallete for you, you just tell it this:
0=color 0
1=color 1
2=color 2
3=color 3
for example, if you drew a smily face:
00000000
00100100
00000000
10000001
01000010
00111100
00000000
in your code, you apply whatever 4 color pallete you want to that tile, and the colors will show up as whatever you assigned as color 0, and 1, since we didn't use color 2 or 3, they wouldn't show up in that tile. Sorry You probably knew that, but oh well. YY-Chr has those multiple palletes so you can click on a color in one of them to quick change to that pallete, and see how everything will look with the desired color, so you don't always have too keep changing them to certain colors to see how they'll look in the actual game. Read me? And get used to start numbering from 0, instead of 1. The NES is capable of making 4 sprite pallets, and 4 background palletes. I'm not really familiar with setting up different palletes for backgrounds, but I know how to do it for sprites. Oh, and make sure that the first color of every pallete (the invisible color) is BLACK! I always make sure it's 3F, and not like 0D, It just seems more reliable. but anyways, I hope you get that.
Celius wrote:
I always make sure it's 3F
$0F is the more 'typical' black and is used by most games. But $3F is probably fine.
Staying away from $0D is very good advice.
Yeah, I think 0D just seems like a bad, fake, slightly reliable black.
Have I been mistaken in what I've read before? I somehow got the impression that $0D was better to use, because $0F had problems on some TVs, so most of the games developed used $0D. I thought that was thought to be the problem on the release of the newest Strangulation Games Multi-cart... using $0F instead of $0D. I think that was found to not be the problem afterall.
I'm still learning all this color stuff too, though, so I must've been mistaken about the which-black-to-use thing
Roth wrote:
I somehow got the impression that $0D was better to use, because $0F had problems on some TVs, so most of the games developed used $0D.
You've got it backwards - $0E/$0F (as well as $1E/$1F, $2E/$2F, and $3E/$3F) are safe to use, but $0D causes problems on some TVs.
It seems I have to read more carefully. Thanks for letting me know all this stuff. I'll see what I can pull off graphically now
Thanks a million for all the responses.
Are $1d, $2d and $3d safe to use ? Especially the $1d, it seems, in emulation, to be the only dark grey close to black, but not totally blak. This is usefull when a blak sprite overlapps black BG, it looks crazy if both uses the same color, this is noticable in CastleVania2 - Simon's Quest.
The hero is black, and when you're on a black font, the hero's black stuff seems to suddently disapear.
To convert BMP's to CHR's I use a program I wrote a while ago, NES Tile Creator. Here is a temporary link for it:
http://s59.yousendit.com/d.php?id=36EH2 ... 1H13C2BSWW
It works quite well since it lets you pick the colors you wanto to convert, and works with any BMP.
Here is a somewhat more permanent link to the program above, in case anyone is interested. Just rename from ".jpg" to ".rar".
http://www.nesstuff.kit.net/nestc.jpg
i cant use that link, it sounds like a treasure!
im trying to change the opening scene of Tecmo super bowl. and i just got my first tile editor a short time ago, and only used it twice. i suck at it. and i want a way to just copy a pic and paiste it over in tile format.
This program is not the best option for editing the graphics of a game, since it can't load tiles from ROM's. It only loads "bmp" files, wich usualy contain tiles you drew yourself, in whatever editing software you're used to.
You could fill in a bmp with some game's graphics and change them, but I don't see the point. And replacing the graphics in the ROM with the new ones would not be so easy either... Maybe this tool is not exactly what you're looking for...
Bregalad wrote:
Are $1d, $2d and $3d safe to use ?
Yes. If you look at the
brightness levels on the Wiki, you'll see that only $0D outputs a negative level. $1D is the same as $xF, $2D is a bit less than $00, and $3D is very close to $10.
What if you stored $4D into $2007? Would it get the same effect on TVs that $0D does? Because I know it wraps around, or at least on emulators, it does. Does it wrap around on the real NES?
yes, that would write $0D to the palette.
Palette entries are only 6-bits wide. The high two bits are lost.
Thanks, blargg. I now know there is no color sinificanly darker than $00, but not totally black lile $1d, $0e or $0f. $2d seems not drak enough. I'd like the NES have one color with a level of 0.1 or something, to do shadow on sprites but not have it merge with the BG. If black it merge with BG, and if grey it looks ugly.
Try rapidly alternating between $02 and $08.
I think it would look rather look dull. Maybe the flickering won't really be percived, but if it is, this will look a strange flashing grey. I'll still try it someday.
Fighting games flicker shadows all the time...