FARID wrote:
I bet nes designers used such a customized software back then.
Yes, and the early games look really blocky and flat because of all the limitations of the drawing process that was used back then. Pattern tables, name tables, palettes and such are aspects of the distribution format, and editing directly under those constraints can be very limiting for artists. I know I often break the rules of NES graphics, doing things such as using more colors than allowed to color code parts of the drawing before applying the final colors and effects. An editor that only allowed 4 colors per tile taken from 25 colors distributed in 8 palettes would never let me work like this. Sometimes we break the rules temporarily as part of the creation/cleanup process, meaning that the restrictions imposed by the hardware should not be applied/enforced until the very last step. This might not be clear to people who are not artists, but not everyone works exclusively with the delivery format.
This is similar to questioning why an illustrator uses brushes, transparency and vector tools when the final product he must deliver is just an array of RGB pixels. Sure, he could just open MS Paint and draw the entire picture pixel by pixel, but it'll take much longer and the result will hardly be as good. It's much better to let artists choose their own limitations during the creation process, and just create the final product by exporting/converting.
Nowadays we have very advanced tools to do things, and trying to mimic the way things were done in the 80's does NOT make your retro games any better. Back then they often used crude assemblers, that only supported tiny labels, no macros, and so on. Why would anyone choose to work under those limitations nowadays, when we have much better tools?
I'm not saying that everyone should draw their NES graphics in Photoshop or GIMP... in fact, I personally think that's overkill. But every artist already has their own workflow, and telling them to drop that in favour of the quirks of a tiny little editor will hardly give the best results. That's why I think it's better to focus on the conversion process and optimization of the distribution data, rather than pointlessly trying to offer good drawing tools, which may not be easy to do, and will hardly please artists anyway.