Moon Crystal - Famicom - What's the actual tile size?

Discuss technical or other issues relating to programming the Nintendo Entertainment System, Famicom, or compatible systems. See the NESdev wiki for more information.

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bluesword
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Moon Crystal - Famicom - What's the actual tile size?

Post by bluesword »

Hello, I'm new in this board, I don't know if this is the proper section, but I've been trying to make a tile set out of Moon Crystal for the Famicom, I'm using Tile Layer Pro, but it doesn't matter which sizes do I use (8x8, 16x8, 8x16, 16x16) I cannot come up with a tile set with no less than >20 tiles! It seems like each tile is 7x7 but I think that's impossible for the NES to handle, please help!
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Banshaku
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Re: Moon Crystal - Famicom - What's the actual tile size?

Post by Banshaku »

A nes tile is 8x8 pixels.

If you want to have a better idea how they used them in the game, I would suggest you to play Moon Crystal with an emulator that shows the content of video RAM like mesen. While playing the game, go in the debug menu, select PPU viewer and check the content of the name table, chr , sprite etc. You can even save the content of the CHR to a PNG file too. This should help you to create an appropriate tile set ;)

Have fun!

edit:

You may need to go to the preference menu (options, preferences) and enable the "developer mode" if you want to see the debug menu.
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nesrocks
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Re: Moon Crystal - Famicom - What's the actual tile size?

Post by nesrocks »

Here's a NAM and PAL extracted directly from the game with fceux. Open the game rom in yy-chr and then open the palette.dat and the bg.nam to view it (remember to scroll the CHR down to the appropriate bank). It seems to be 8x8 indeed. NES has a 8x16 mode but this game seems to use 8x8.

edit: the first bank is for the HUD, the third bank is for the background graphics of stage 1.

Also, it seems that all you want is the CHR, which you can view in yy-chr if you have the rom. Is that it?
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bluesword
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Re: Moon Crystal - Famicom - What's the actual tile size?

Post by bluesword »

OMG! Thank you so much both of you! nesrocks and Banshaku! I'll definitely have to master these tools, but the files that nesrocks provided should do the trick, and Banshaku's instructions are a good start point

I'm impressed that this game used such tiny tiles! It's going to take a while to make a tile map of this on Unity :P
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nesrocks
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Re: Moon Crystal - Famicom - What's the actual tile size?

Post by nesrocks »

No problem! ^^ You can also open the file on Nes Screen Tool and it lets you rearrange the tiles in the CHR table without losing their reference on the NAM view. And you can right click a tile on the NAM view to highlight it on the CHR table, so you can make your life easier reorganizing everything.
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Sumez
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Re: Moon Crystal - Famicom - What's the actual tile size?

Post by Sumez »

bluesword wrote: I'm impressed that this game used such tiny tiles! It's going to take a while to make a tile map of this on Unity :P
On NES, the 8x8 tiles are usually used in groups of four to build larger 16x16 tiles, as each group of that size is limited to its own four color palette.
Often several of the 8x8 tiles can be reused between multiple of those, of course.

Grouping multiple tiles like this in the software is a very common way to compress level data to take up less space, and make it easier to build more stages.
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