NES Graphic Converters

I'm using a converter I made a while back (in Delphi, I should probably convert it to something else) that doesn't care if the source images are indexed or true color, it just cares about the final colors of the pixels. It works by using additional images, one containing all the palettes used by the tiles (one palette per row, with the first color being the palette's ID) and the other specifying what palette should be used for each tile (this is done by using the palette IDs). If you are using only one palette you don't need the "attribute" image. This was the best way I could find to use multiple palettes in my images.

A feature I miss in graphic converters is the option of encoding two-dimensional areas into consecutive tiles, but I'm not sure what's the best way to implement this (maybe use an external file to describe the 2D areas?). And also an option to encode 8x16 tiles.

I just make sure all my palettes are in the same order sky, dark, medium, light (or sky, light, medium, dark if it's better), and then draw everything in shades of black, gray, and white.


I seem to remember that one of my converters supports "metatile width" and "metatile height" on the command line. Thus you can get your 8x16 or 8x32 for NES, or a 16x16 or 32x32 that works well for scrolling map background tiles or Genesis/GBA style 1D sprite tile mapping.

I used to do something similar, but looking at everything with the same palette isn't a good preview of what the end result is going to look like. I like to work with the actual colors, and having to replace them all before converting is a much biger pain than creating the palette and attribute images my converter uses.


I considered doing something like this, but that's not versatile enough. I could use the same approach I used for the palettes, and allow an extra image to describe tile groups. The dimensions of this image would be 8 times smaller than the image with the tiles, and pixels with the same color would mean tiles of the same group. This way I could even encode irregular shapes (no need to use only squares and rectangles). But what would be the best way to specify the order in which groups are encoded? Maybe the brightness of the colors used to specify the groups. I'd also need to find a way to specify the metatile dimensions for each group. Maybe I could add some meaning to the RGB values of the group colors, like R = group priority, G = metatile width, B = metatile height.

I use MS paint to draw all my sprites, because I'm not comfortable with the constraints imposed by traditional tile editors, which IMO encourage the designing of blocky graphics. So the ideas above are an attempt to use the same image for both drawing and converting, without the need to "export" (rearrange the individual tiles and replace colors) anything before conversion.