Gimmick Map research!(Level 1~2)

map one block [offaet 0x1800]

map one [offset 0x10]

level 1

level 2

Nice work!

Cool stuff! Are you doing this by automatic metatile conversion software you made or something?

Yes,it by software, i made!

That top secret room in the ship level is so hard to reach. It's actually on top of the regular secret area at the top left (even though it may be on the same map area as the ship indoors.

I think I saw gimmick map stuff being done somewhere else before.

There's a map set by TerraEsperZ.
http://www.vgmaps.com/Atlas/NES/index.htm#Gimmick

Good job!I think i can make other game map!

Good attempt still. Did you reverse engineer the metatile format?

Yes,
do you want make any game map，I can help you！
maybe PRG game is easy！

So, the product already existed (Gimmick! maps on vgmaps), but the process is enjoyable to take part in and something valuable for you to post about. How do you find the maps? First find the tileset, then graphically dump memory using it until you find something that looks like a map, then figure out the width?

first
find the title,it's easy,can dump from emulator

next
find the map bolck ，if map consists of block！
（can analysis from ppu data（nametable））
block example：


last find the map data

By all means keep going. I was just linking to some existing maps.

I wouldn't mind seeing a gimmick extra-levels patch.

Yeah, keep going. The images at vgmaps represent how the levels are delivered to the player, but yours are more technical, showing how they are stored in the ROM, and that's more interesting for programmers (while the ones at vgmaps might be more interesting for players).

It would be nice if you posted some of the technical info though... such as the exact format used for metatiles and maps, whether there's any kind of compression, things like that...

It's easy!
Give a game
and I can teach you hwo to make a world map of this game!

Dragon Warrior 2 had me stumped for a while, I still haven't completely figured out the map format for that game. (Referring to the non-overworld maps. Overworld map is simple RLE.)
I can extract them out of RAM no problem, but I never figured out the compression exactly.
But I don't feel like sending anyone out on pointless mission.

Try making a map for River Raid for Atari 2600.

I thought River Raid was somewhat random. Is that not correct?

River Raid is pseudorandom based on a constant seed. Its map is reportedly thousands of screens tall, but it's the same every time as I understand it.

Isn't Pitfall like this too?

Pitfall I think has several predefined screen layouts along with a 254 byte table of what layout to use on a given screen. See Thomas Clancy's map.

Pitfall's "254 byte table" is actually a bidirectionally-clockable LFSR.

I can only make nes(fc) map

I'll try to make this game's world map

It's a wild goose chase, don't bother unless you simply want to poke memory to change the map number then extract the map out of a savestate.
I've already done that stuff. http://www.dwedit.org/dw2maps/

I found a Gimmick Editor
named gedit013.zip

http://bin.smwcentral.net/u/9410/gedit013.zip

It's me and my necrobumps again...


This editor is awesome! It's also very interesting to see how Gimmick handles level data.

I'm a bit surprised by how "rigid" and somewhat wasteful the level format is. Every level is the exact same size (8x4 screenfuls, that is 2048x768 pixels with each screen being 256x192 pixels). Even though the level data is divided into screens, every screen is saved as-is into ROM, even duplicates of empty screens. The game uses 16x16 pixel metatiles, so that brings the map data of a single level to exactly 6 KB. There are only 7 levels in the game though, so the total map data should be around 42 KB (not including other related data, like objects), which is perfectly fine for a 256 KB PRG game.

I guess this goes to show that you don't always need to pull crazy tricks all over the place or squeeze out every last optimization to make an awesome game. (That's not to say this game isn't well engineered, it definitely is, with its slope physics, object interactions, enemy AI and overall attention to detail.)

Bart VS The Space Mutants!