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Video Game Atlas

Posted by Zonk on from the zebes-to-matoya's-cave dept.

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.

2 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. Sweetness by Elranzer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Reminds me of the maps they use to have in Nintendo Power (early Nintendo Power, before they sucked).

  2. How did they generate them? by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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