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Video Game Atlas
Via Joystiq, a very worthy site that's sure to stoke the fires of nostalgia. VGMaps.com is an altas for games old and new, with extremely impressive stitched together screenshot displays. Some of my personal favorites include Zebes, The Maniac Mansion, and the FFI Overworld.
-World.png){kind=link}
Reminds me of the maps they use to have in Nintendo Power (early Nintendo Power, before they sucked).
That Maniac Mansion stitch really reminds me of the headache that game gave me the first time I tried to play it. I was quite young and keeping track of a 3D house layout with nothing but those 2D room layouts to guide me was. . .a little much.
Still, I imagine that learning experience (and others like it) really helped me learn to "think in 3D" (I'm sure there's some psyche term for this, but I don't know it). Kinda reminds ya that videogames of today don't make you think as hard as the old ones did... Less imigination required on the part of the user.
It's a nice idea, but the site is horribly designed. Yuck.
Sentimentality is merely the Bank Holiday of cynicism.
- Oscar Wilde
You can do something similar to generate top-down, non-perspective views of more modern games like Half-Life, which has a whole bunch of development features for making map 'overviews'.
Unfortunately, despite the original Half-Life's apparently seamless world, there are plenty of overlaps between different maps, so it's highly unlikely anyone could build a sensible map of Black Mesa that way.
Half-Life 2 might be more promising, and I believe it's got the same overview commands - I think I need to experiment to find out if City 17 really could be 'mapped' in this manner, even if it were to prove rather difficult to navigate through the highly-3D building mazes present with the 2D map produced...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
..seems to me like they "borrowed" a number of maps from a number of different sources..
in some cases, these maps aren't in-game maps; they feature mark-up or lists of items which clearly show some degree of input by authors.
I'm not suggesting that they're ripping off anyone; I'm just curious as to whether they got permission from such a diverse set of people..
Now you can take your whole collection of Mega Man sprites to destinations unknown!
Yes, I know how, but I'd be interesting in hearing what they had to go throw to acquire each of the screens, what did they use to "stitch" the images together, etc.
I know the article was about pictures, but I'd like to digress to "music" as this reminds me of when I "ripped" the music for the Apple ][ version of "Karateka" (also by Jordan Mechner, his "ground breaking" precursor work to Prince of Persia.)
There was a article in the magazine "Nibble" about "pseudo duel voices" from the Apple squeeker. (Yeah, us Apple fans were always jeolous that the C64 had REAL 4-voice FM music.) Anyways, After looking at the boot code, and seeing that it re-mapped the CTRL-RESET vector, it was easy to change it to dump into the "monitor" when pressed after beating the game . I wrote a small little assembly program to scan memory tucked away at $0300, looking for a sequence of bytes. Since the speaker output was at $C030, and the 6502 was little endian CPU, scanning for 0x30 0xC0 would reveal the assmebly code for the "music" code. And Since the code had a "RTS" (return to caller), you could search for a "JSR" (Jump to Sub Routine) via 0x20 0xSS xSS, to see who called it.
I finally found the code and the data. Amazingly, the data for the notes matched the info in the "Nibble" article. I decoded the notes, and transcriped it in a MIDI file.
To me, the process was more fun then the actual product. Guess that's one defintion of what makes a person a geek / engineer. LOL.
Is there any place on the net to talk bout game ripping?
Peace
Not a lot of games listed, but I would like to see more scanned from old game magazines. I don't know if that is illegal.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Guardian Legend? Faxanadu? DRAGON WARRIOR?!?
Sorry, boss - I didn't realize trying to download a 100 ROMs at once would completely saturate our company pipe. But see, there's this site, Slashdot - and it linked to this site, vgmaps...
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
Wow this takes me back to my younger geek days! I remember using colored pencils to hand draw maps for certain games. I would collapse the maps onto a minimum number of pages by arranging them very similar to the vgmaps site. I took great care to achieve proper scale and proportion as I documented the levels. I can mentally see my map for Area 3 of SMB2 captured here
All those hours wasted! Wow, I wish I had saved those maps. Every door, every chain, each spike, man did I need a life!
This one gang kept wanting me to join cause I'm pretty good with a bo staff.
I did a few stitch-togethers for games in MAME. Somewhere I have the maps of Jr. Pac-Man (including intermissions), Tutankham, and Congo Bongo.
Been thinking about putting together the map for the Atari 2600's Pitfall, but haven't had the time to play it to get the whole thing. Plus the problem that travelling underground takes you (if memory serves) three screens at a time across the map, so there'd be three underground maps to create. A complete Pitfall 2 map though would be more interesting.
I like to do the same thing with animated shows that do long pans over a single plate.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Site's dead/dyin--Totally failed it.
When will the Slashdot editors realize that the Slashdot Effect is more than an in-joke? Surprise, you idiots! There's some responsibility that comes with being an editor. If you find a cool link to a small site, you have the responsibility to ensure that the site can "handle" it -- be that afford the extra bandwidth serving or hold up under a slashdot load. Heaven forbid you actually try to contact the webmaster/owner of a potential victimsite! If anything, you count on some cavalier regular to go and mirror the site--again, assuredly without permission.
Or is this another case of the-internet-wants-to-be-free? When will Slashdot and its editors grow up?
Let me guess: -1, Reality
The Maniac Mansion Map sure beats the ascii map I drew in the FAQ I wrote for the game back in '96.
n sion.txt
m l
http://db.gamefaqs.com/console/nes/file/maniac_ma
It was really tricky trying to create a representation of the Mansion limited to the width of a page and still make it somewhat readable.
Now if only I could get my hands on the prototype of Maniac Mansion that recently surfaced.
http://www.video-fenky.com/features/rg/maniac.sht
Now I don't know about any of you but are all the images missing on the site?? All the pages are missing too.
It's 7:21 EST on Mar. 22, 2005.
Move sig now.