NES Tile/Map editor idea.

Has any attempteed to use Gameboy Tile Designer (http://www.devrs.com/gb/hmgd/gbtd.html) and Gameboy Map Builder (http://www.devrs.com/gb/hmgd/gbmb.html) to build maps for the NES? This would also seem to be useful for sprites, as it also supports 8x8 and 8x16 objects. The are quite a few utilities to convert bitmaps to this format (http://www.devrs.com/gb/hmgd/supp.html).

These were excellent tools for building tiles, maps and, sprites for the Gameboy.

Here's a few things that would make it more useful:
If the tile size is set to 16x16, the palette could be assigned correctly for NES use. The only problem is that this would waste some tiles, but that could easily be fixed with an optimizer pass.

Each palette would have to have color zero set to the same value.

The GB 4 color binary tile would need to be modified for NES use. The Gamboy format exports each bitplane line interleaved, whereas the NES exports and entire bitplane.

For example: an 8 pixel line of color 1 is exported as:
FF 00

on the NES this would need to be converted to (I think):
FF xx xx xx xx xx xx xx
00 xx xx xx xx xx xx xx

It exports a 16x16 tile as 4 8x8 pieces in the following order:
UL UR LL LR. I'm not sure this is an issue, since it should create a map with the correct tile indexes, regardless of tilesize.


Is there something I'm missing?

This sounds like a good tool for NES development.

I will be testing this out shortly, and will post whatever conversion utility I create.

There is a tool already (Gameman Gameboy Tile & Map Optimizer/Exporter version 0.039a) that is supposed to optimize the maps. I've used this before, but can't remeber what it actually did.