Maptapper released!

[BippyM]

Nice tutorial tapper.. Can you look at skweek. The map search doesn't work.

[zenox98]

Nice tut. I'm getting there - didn't need to look at the tut to find the tiles, so some progress is being made

[Codetapper]

Originally Posted by bippym

Nice tutorial tapper.. Can you look at skweek. The map search doesn't work.

Can you upload your config file and USS file please? It saves us a lot of work.

Everyone needs to learn that this tool saves your work easily - you don't lose all your settings unlike GfxRip. Hence we can work with your exact image and work out the problems.

[Joe Maroni]

Skweek:

http://eab.abime.net/project-maptapp...tml#post896311

[Codetapper]

I thought I'd better add a little disclaimer about Maptapper. There are some games like Top Banana where the "correct" tiles appear to be the same as "random colours thrown together by a blind elephant" and the team cannot offer hints as to how to distinguish these "correct" tiles from the random junk in memory.

Enlarge the picture to see the horror. How on earth would you find these?

[Retro1234]

Very CooL
Would it be possible to have a tile search tool?
Been wanting to try this finaly had a chance -Realy like the Map search tool .Great to see an App like this released great work

[killergorilla]

Seriously Codetapper this is an amazing release.

You deserve a shed load of credit for your continuing output.

Much appreciated. MUCH appreciated.

[Codetapper]

Thanks for the comments.

The grid feature has been implemented in the Tile Ripper tab as of v0.8.4 (Build 56). Under the Tools menu you can set the thickness of the grid (defaults to 1 pixel) and toggle it on and off with the checkbox at the top of the screen.

I've also included a very rough C64 mode, and included is a Target Renegade level 1 map. Cyan in the map is the changable colour on the map, so it's not 100% everywhere but gives you an idea what you can do!

[BippyM]

Cool additions thanks. Any chance of allowing the grid colour to be specified/changed?

[Codetapper]

Yep, hopefully the next version

[BippyM]

Wicked. Thanks

Brilliant stuff. I got my hands on the original GfxRip only yesterday morning before I later stumbled across this little gem. You've done a great job modernising it.

I think this is a bug.. or perhaps I just couldn't work out otherwise.. In the Map Search tab, once I've chosen to apply one of the colour replacement tools, I am then unable to adjust the selection area.

Also.. On loading the app, it immediately errors with: Access violation at address 76F6ACB2 in module 'nt.dll'. Write of address 00404FA1. It then continues on happily (Windows 7 32-bit running under VirtualBox)

Good work with this, it's rather good.

[Codetapper]

Originally Posted by TimRex

Brilliant stuff. I got my hands on the original GfxRip only yesterday morning before I later stumbled across this little gem. You've done a great job modernising it.

I think this is a bug.. or perhaps I just couldn't work out otherwise.. In the Map Search tab, once I've chosen to apply one of the colour replacement tools, I am then unable to adjust the selection area.

Press the button again to deselect the button. The selection area must be at least 16x16 pixels but you can move it by clicking inside it and dragging to where it should be and resizing.

Also.. On loading the app, it immediately errors with: Access violation at address 76F6ACB2 in module 'nt.dll'. Write of address 00404FA1. It then continues on happily (Windows 7 32-bit running under VirtualBox)

Good work with this, it's rather good.

Can you send me the config file of the last project you were working on (and that it's trying to load on startup) please? And the USS file if there is one. Maybe there's some weird setting in it.

Alternatively go to the Tools menu and set it up to not load the last project you were working on, quit and restart - and see if the message still appears.

Also are you definitely using the latest version? Some older versions had a problem when the map was set by default to a 64x64 map, and if your tiles happened to be 320x200 then it'd be trying to allocate 1 gig of ram etc and pop up an error. But the later versions detect that and warn you nicely. Please update and tell me if it's still not working.

[turrican3]

incredible work !
could it be used to change the graphics in game not jsut in the a save state ?
with this tool could we change the games graphics ?
i don't think so, but it costs me nothing to ask.
could we make hacked verions of games like some did with mame ?

[Codetapper]

Originally Posted by turrican3

incredible work !
could it be used to change the graphics in game not jsut in the a save state ?
with this tool could we change the games graphics ?
i don't think so, but it costs me nothing to ask.
could we make hacked verions of games like some did with mame ?

Once the tiles are found and extracted, there's nothing stopping you repainting new ones and inserting them back into the game. You would have to convert the graphics back to their correct format though.

A lot of games have a separate "bounds" map showing where you can walk, fall, die, respawn, special collectables etc so although you could change the map, your character may not obey the new map.

[turrican3]

but you can't put it back to the adf or exe ?

[Codetapper]

The game stores the graphics in a particular format (with infinite possibilities due to widths, skip values etc), and Maptapper converts them to an 8-bit indexed colour image.

Currently you would have to write your own utility to convert the graphics back to the binary format the game needs and overwrite the data yourself.

Maptapper in theory knows how to convert the graphics back as it knows the exact settings used, but there's no code to do this. But even if it did, it's not an easy job because most games store all the data compressed on the disk aswell, so you could write back to the savestate but not necessarily the EXE or ADF.

[turrican3]

Originally Posted by Codetapper

The game stores the graphics in a particular format (with infinite possibilities due to widths, skip values etc), and Maptapper converts them to an 8-bit indexed colour image.

Currently you would have to write your own utility to convert the graphics back to the binary format the game needs and overwrite the data yourself.

Maptapper in theory knows how to convert the graphics back as it knows the exact settings used, but there's no code to do this. But even if it did, it's not an easy job because most games store all the data compressed on the disk aswell, so you could write back to the savestate but not necessarily the EXE or ADF.

If you have time, you could make something in this way ?
I don't know if you have an interest ?
sadly i have not the knowledge to do this.

[BippyM]

I think there are a lot of other things that are more important just for the ripping of maps. As nice as this is Maptapper couldn't support every game etc and would probably need to have settings for them all.

Let's be grateful for what we currently have. Who knows what the future will bring though!

Originally Posted by TimRex

Also.. On loading the app, it immediately errors with: Access violation at address 76F6ACB2 in module 'nt.dll'. Write of address 00404FA1. It then continues on happily (Windows 7 32-bit running under VirtualBox)

Originally Posted by Codetapper

Alternatively go to the Tools menu and set it up to not load the last project you were working on, quit and restart - and see if the message still appears.

It actually happened the very first time I loaded it, and every subsequent time. I also tried your advice just now (disabling the last-project) and I still receive the same error.

Also are you definitely using the latest version? Some older versions had a problem when the map was set by default to a 64x64 map, and if your tiles happened to be 320x200 then it'd be trying to allocate 1 gig of ram etc and pop up an error. But the later versions detect that and warn you nicely. Please update and tell me if it's still not working.

0.8.4 Build 57
The error occurs before the main window context is drawn, or even a window frame.