nesdev.com

Group Hug!

Laughable. I would distribute with impunity.

EDIT: To clarify, I mean in this specific case, for several reasons:

1. It is free software

2. It appears to work for many people already, meaning it's unlikely that the missing files are specific to people who have bought VB6 or somesuch

3. Even if this would not normally be allowed, it is only going to be used by a few people and is highly unlikely to be noticed

I don't care what Microsoft has to say on any of these points. According to my personal moral compass, this is distributable.

I was able to recreate my metatiles the other night to make a few screens. One complaint I had was that it wasn't very intuitive to figure out how to load the CHR file when starting from scratch. Took me quite a while to realize it's in the MCF editor, you click on the '0', '1', etc. buttons. I guess it looks a little more obvious though after opening an existing project.

I also wasn't a fan of the windows "ding!" sound playing when it opened a project successfully, but that's my fault for having windows system sounds enabled (why, I don't know). I usually expect an error or something stopping if I hear that. No big deal.

I'm sure I'll have more comments after using it more.

Oh ok ok I'm sorry that the editor doesn't work on your PC, while I was happy to try it on mine.

You should make a clear barrier between the old system we're developing for and the new systems we use as a tool to make stuff for the old system. This is called cross development. There is people who code C64 demoes with a C64, but to be honnest, good luck. I really wouldn't do that even if I like the C64.
By using a modern PC (even a 1998 PC is "modern" compared to the NES), we really makes the job of developing a NES game much easier than the one that people had back then in the '80s. Just ask Neil Baldwin, they had to wait a dozen of minutes between each compilation of their game, while we can do it in less than one second.

This is kind of out-topic though. I didn't know the guy that made the editor did it with a really old VB version, but I don't think it matters if the executable binary is forward compatible with newer version of windows. What is ironical is that it has issues on older Windows and runs fine on seven. You could understand a win32 executable made with the latest tools would have issues on older windows, but not the other way arround. Oh well.

So back on the topic, after all that have been said in this thread, this editor is very promising, but it lack a few features that should be improved in a future version :
- Full compatibility with Windows XP
- Improvements on user interface.
- More flexibility in compression shemes (take the advantage of using less than 8 bit for metatiles indexes).
- Export maps with pointers to each screen (screen mode) or each row (area mode)

Hopefully those improvements will be made, and the editor will become like really great.

_________________
Life is complex: it has both real and imaginary components.

I'm just happy to be able to make even one screen with the data all organized, I have no trouble compressing it later of my own accord if I have to.

Nobody complains because Google has released Chrome, both as a stand-alone browser and a plug-in for IE 6-8.


If it's free software, then where's the source code? :þ


I thought one advantage of cross-development for NES, as opposed to cross-development for something like iOS or Android, was that one could get away with using a platform that isn't the latest and greatest.


Oh, that's what you meant. So it would include the computer on which I developed LJ65, a Dell Dimension from fourth quarter 2000.

Anyway, you can probably get full compatibility with Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 if you upgrade to the latest version of Visual Basic for no charge.

VB.NET, however, is not 100% backwards compatible with VB6.

_________________
Download STREEMERZ for NES from fauxgame.com! — Some other stuff I've done: fo.aspekt.fi

Sorry that I didn't post any links to the files, it's just that I searched for them in a chaotic manner (I just went to Google and searched for their names) and didn't keep the links (I usually test new programs in a VM that resets its hard disk on power off, so there is no history).

I just saw that other people were having problems afterward, so I figured I'd tell them they could just download the files and put them in the same folder without having to install anything or make any system changes.

This is what I had in mind with my editor. There were too much bugs at the time to be releasable to the public. Now I couldn't work on it for a while so the code base feel quite "foreign". I will need to clean it up if I can find the time some day. I still want to finish it.

- Nobody wants to recompile/port it on/to Visual C++, for example!? I would do with pleasure, but I don't know VC++...

If you want, you could try porting it to the Allegro library that you have used for your RockNES emulator.

Thanks for all the feedback. I appologize for the lack of documentation. I'll have to work on that.

@NESICIDE
SMB1 was recreated manually, CV2 was directly imported (with a hex editor), and NG was slightly modified.

@tokumaru
As bad as it sounds, I'm not sure how large of a map you can make. I'll look into it. I've also been working on allowing as many levels of metatiles as the user defines. This will probably have to wait until I port it to a newer languange.

@Bregalad
I was watching (gridiron) football yesterday, so I had a chance to implement those compression schemes. I got to thinking about pointers to screens/rows in compressed maps. How would you relay the starting and stopping points to the assembler?

@Zepper

Converting to C++ doesn't means automatically a better software. The current "problem" is that there was no installer package for the required dependencies. Unless you have a good reason you should not try to convert a software if it works well already.

@Bregalad and 65024U

<rant>

All Windows OS does not contain any of the VB run time, none of them. If it happens to works well on Windows 7 of Windows whatever, it's because you installed another program that contained the run time with it. With software made it VB6, you're always stuck with dependencies, you have no choice. For C++, if you're lucky, the MSVRCTXX version may already be installed depending how recent is your version of windows but it still have dependencies.

Sorry to sound rude but you both were first to Koitsu and I don't think it was the right thing to do. Before saying to someone to use a newer OS you should get your fact right. And 65024U, you should be careful on how you say things because it felt to me that you were adding oil on fire for no real purpose.

</rant>

Sorry if I sounded like that, but depending on such items to be on a users PC is probably a bad idea (and makes me mad because M$ makes crap software), maybe if the source was released somebody or even the original programmer would do it, maybe program it with a graphics library, so this stuff doesn't happen and maybe it runs more efficient. Nice tool? HECK YEAH. I can't wait to need this, but yet....I'm so not downloading any VB for it. 0_o

This is because 10/20 years ago hard disk space was an issue. For getting around those, DLL/OCX libraries were made and program were sharing those library. Of course it brought other issues in the way (read about DLL hell) but at the time it was the way to save space. Now we don't have that space issue anymore.

Don't worry, you don't need to have VB on your computer to make it work: you just need the proper dependencies (ocx/dll whatever) in the same folder or system32 and it will work fine.

Maybe the author didn't realize about it since when you have VB6 installed on your computer you have all those files already installed in system32. This a common deployment issues, forgetting about dependencies. Since he has a license for it, he has the right to distribute them with the program.