As if you couldn't tell by the lack of updates, I haven't been working on my utilities at all, since college simply takes more time now. Yay, last final of fall term was today. Don't depend on any progress soon, but be comforted I will NOT remove this site simply because of lack of interest - even if only one person a week visits it.

Spc2Midi .130 preview

Spc2Midi .121 - Felt like working on this old project some more. Still a console app, but it should work in helpless WinNT/XP now.

Most curious?? Sorry all you nearly 200 visitors Sunday. Not sure why flood, but I haven't done anything new :/
Piken's Utilities, had a total of 294 visitors last week. Visitors for last week divided per weekday:
2002-04-08: 20
2002-04-09: 19
2002-04-10: 17
2002-04-11: 14
2002-04-12: 16
2002-04-13: 17
2002-04-14: 191

Comb ordering DLL with VB demo
Totally unrelated to emulation: A friend recently asked me to speed up his already speedy Visual Basic comb sorting routine. Since I recently learned how to create DLLs in assembler, I thought this would be a good exercise/challenge to try. The demo includes the DLL and a VB example that shows how to call it using a few different array types. On this test machine (PII 350Mhz), it ordered 1 million longs in 10 seconds. I'm not sure if that is really that good or not, but it seems fast enough to me.

That GUI I've been too lazy to make any significant progress on is now about 95% done; the one I've been teasing you about since last year, so long that you don't even care anymore? ;-)

Spc2Midi .116

Spc2Midi .113 - minor

Fiery Gui (just for fun)
In case you've ever wondered, this is what it looks like when your computer overheats. If you wish to be amused, dld it, view it, and simply delete it when it no longer amuses you.

SF Sound Manual
Anyone read the Super Famicom Sound Manual transcribed by Ledi? It's great and very informative, but notice there are a few missing parts? Well, I added them, using my ASCIIfying ability for the diagrams. Of course, if you have the original TIFs scanned in my Antitrack, my additions are unbeneficial. Personally, I find a huge text file more accessible though.

Grr, Win2k sucks for DOS support. I used a halt instruction in the main loop to reduce CPU usage, and on my computer it works great. You can even hear the fan tone lower because less power is drawn. Windows 95/98 use the HLT instruction as a welcome opportunity to perform extra processing, but Win2k terminates the program with a GPF. Since the program's birth, it has set the fps to 30 for more precision, but instead of Win2k simply intercepting the port write and chaining to my program at the proper periods (a little jitter acceptable), it's stuck at dumb 18.2 ticks per second. Discovered the real reason why Spc2Midi does not work with the college computers is because they have legacy emulation disabled (and of course, I don't administrative privileges to enable them).

Tried Spc2Midi last night on my 25Mhz 386, and it played the Mario RPG ending in real time! ;-) (albeit at only 11khz)

Spc2Midi .111 - (source)

Had a great summer vacation, visiting with family and friends, programming until the next day's dawn, watching tons of anime, and even playing a few video games. No, it only lasted two months, not four like the lack of updates would suggest; but I thought I should let anyone reading that I'm still alive. Amazing, no updates in four months and just this week my counter gave 120 hits!?

Now I'm back looking for a programming job. Currently I'm just tutoring part time in the college lab.

Spc2Midi .110
Added a few minor features to Spc2Midi, simple voice emulation (no gain/adsr yet), fast forward, rewind, and for mere amusement, even playing backwards! Temporarily substituted wave output for the FM. Just found out today that it sometimes unexplainably crashes under Win2k (college computers!?) but has been fully compatible with DOS/Win95/Win98. You might want to download it simply to hear familiar songs played the wrong way.

I'm graduating in a week and a half. Only a fool believes something to be foolproof.

Btw, did I mention that I'll be graduating in a week and a half! Reiteration for emphasization. ;-)

Minor changes to my page colors. Finally (after wasting several hours!) got it to appear correctly under Netscape too (however, NS still has that stupid bug that changes the font after a table, and of course the nice little menu doesn't appear).

ShowTmap - simple tilemap shower
Just a little test program I wrote over the weekend that displays a scrollable Secret of Mana map.

SpriteView .165

Added a page to show just a few of my drawings.

Sorry for the line-feed stripped Zelda routine. Apparently Tripod does not correctly serve the ".asm" filetype. So I renamed it to text, and it appears fine.

Thanks to Necrosaro, Neil, & Fusoya pointing me in the right direction, I figured out Zelda's graphics compression method last night. I probably should have spread finding/tracing/deciphering/commenting over more than one day though so that I got more than 1-1/2 hours sleep ;) For anyone interested, below is the decompiled source with comments. Zelda isn't only game that uses this format. Mario World also does, and Pokemon Silver&Gold both use a more advanced version (more control codes), which is documented by Necrosaro.

Zelda Decompression Routine

Yay, a new year, a new term, three fun new SNES games...

(Just pics, no new release)
Since TileView already has all the code in for displaying tilemaps with VRAM gfx, it wouldn't be difficult to add GB and NES support. The GB has unusual tilemaps because it uses signed numbers -128 - 127. Adding NES tilemap support only requires adding a new table for the byte arrangement. Unfortunately, unless you know exactly where the tilemap and gfx of each savestate start (out of the countless emulators out there and countless version variations), you only see gfx junk. For the two pictures below, I had to manually find the gfx bases with SpriteView.

Just a thought (old one actually) on BgMapper... One thing that has always annoyed me is loading a savestate from a game that changes the screen midframe, loading the savestate, and seeing nothing but VRAM static on most of the screen. Well, I would not be able to do anything about games that use horizontal interrupts for effects (without becoming a mini-emulator!) but maybe it would not be too difficult to simulate the HDMA transfers. Then you could see the screen as it was meant to look and simply click on the line at which the screen was how you wanted it.

Wow, two months with no news. Sorry, still no news, just letting you know I'm still alive :) And for anyone curious what Piken looks like, take a look at the About page.

I've haven't been working on my utilities that much because I have had other programming interests and more than usual coursework. Here are design layouts from one of my very slow-going projects, a better GUI...

Spc2Midi
SpriteView
TileView
TileView - Tileset Association
Spc2Midi - Sample List
TileView - File Position
Cascading Menu

Another webpage style experiment. Hope it's not too purple for you ;) (Netscape really hates my page, so I'd suggest viewing it with IE)

TileView .185 - minor
Added colored backgrounds behind numbers in hexview. It should make correlating what you see in the block mode to the what you see in hex view much easier.

Spc2Midi .105 - no update
Oops, case of mixed up OS's. I used a backslash instead of the internet proper forward slash.

I wish Windows 95 had a file opener this intuitive. Just a design snapshot, not an actual program screenshot!

Found out by surprise that my free space went from 7mb to 46mb! Guess I'll have to fill it all with something :) Just finished texturing this site.

ChronoTrigger Battle - another MIDI export

TileView .184 - nothing really

After a year and a half, I'm experimenting with different styles. If I had known about stylesheets back then, this little site would be a snap to change. Of course, it's so small, it IS a snap to change anyway ;)

Spc2Midi .105
Very minor changes (still no MIDI exporting or GUI :| )

Snapshot of my future GUI. Note this is just a design snapshot, not an actual program screenshot!

UpFront 1.3
Hard to believe it has been a year already since CyberGoth wrote the UpFront front-end for my utilities, but he has written the one year anniversary version for your grabbing.

Added an old document on how SNES graphics are stored.

Updated About page to reflect the four new games I just bought, one of which is Return of the Jedi, completing the Star Wars trilogy for SNES :)

What do you know, the counter says 4000+ people have seen this little corner of the web. It would probably be a bit larger if I updated more frequently ;)

Totally unrelated to emulation - Scanned in an old drawing of a character I planned to one very distant day include in a video game of mine, to display my artistic talent (or need for improvement:)

BgMapper .176 - Real update

Stylesheets are awesome! Too bad they don't fix Netscape's annoyances...
It looks like only IE presents this page the way it is supposed to look (according to W3C standards!). Netscape is doing all kinds of screwy things, like changing my body font anytime after a table, changing the size of the text inside...

BgMapper .174 - Minor update

Twas a fun vacation. Now it's back to college, email, and updating this page once every month or so :)

Spc2Midi Beta .101
This is just for fun, so don't expect anything more from it than mere amusement. For a glimpse of my small musical project, here is the unrefined, non-gui, harsh on the ears, Spc2Midi beta. Below you can see the musical patterns of the Mario World intro being played. The code also is included for anyone curious.

Hbt & Trg Demo Song - Love this short tune.
ChronoTrigger: Frog's Theme - Let the adventure start
Mario World: Bonus Level mistuned - Short but addictive

Any MIDI authors out there feel free to take these mere sequences of notes give them some feeling by adding instruments.

TileView .181

Time is given hour/minute/second, program verions are numbered major/minor/revision, and bible scriptures are spoken book/chapter/verse. The eyes and brain are familiar with major then minor, so why not give dates year/month/day!? Guess it would make too much sense...

SpcTool - Alpha II productions
If you don't already know about this great SPC player, go try it! SpcTool has excellent sound quality, graphical volume meters, sound samples exporting, MIDI logging... My Spc2Midi is in a state of idleness so this more than fills its place.

TileView .167 supports command line options for setting the file position, unit size, wrap width, and viewing mode. You can still set them inside, but now if you often work with a certain game (a "Zelda:LTTP" savestate for example), you could just use a batch file that said "tmv -g 2000 -u 16 -w 1" to always start out at the map with word unit size.

Finally found the levels (five of them anyway) of DKC. The three reasons why I couldn't for so long was because they were stored fully expanded in the ROM (not savestate), they use 32x32 tile blocks (not 8x8 or 16x16), and they are stored upside down and backwards (compared to most other game's levels). Anyways, the tile locations have been updated.

Take a look at this graphics viewer by Neill Corlett (designed the Seiken Densetsu 3 patch). It is small, quick, supports several formats, and does not edit...sound familiar? :) It has linear modes that SpriteView doesn't though. You can see bitmaps, icons in Windows apps, textures in the DOOM WAD...
Nana 1.1
Homepage

TileView's .165
- Maximum wrap has been extended to 512 tiles.

It seemed like 256 tiles would be the largest width that any game's level could be, but I finally found one larger. The first level of Cybernator is 352 tiles wide.

Yeah, I can play yet another one of my favorites. (I would have scored better with a real controller in my hands instead of an awkward keyboard ;) So why not play on the real thing? How else can you get the ending music.

Ever seen these with any other tile viewer? Bet not... But all the graphics formats that SpriteView supports are documented in the readme, so you can even make your own if you want :)

For Lina, BgMapper .163 shows 16x16 tiles now so that the backgrounds in "Yoshi's Island" and "Slayers" look like they should.

SpriteView supports fx graphics, for all you who have "Mario World 2", "StarFox", "Vortex"... Widened the viewing window just a little. Changed the default offset to hex instead of decimal.

After nearly a year of thinking he had dissappeared, I found Qwertie has been hiding at Qwertie's Oasis. Without his docs collection, very little of BgMapper would have ever come into existance.

John McCubbin (CyBeRGoth) wrote handy a Windows (for 3.11 and 9x) front-end for my utilities to make up for their limitations (like no internal file loader and being DOS programs:). It should be quicker for the majority of you out there.

With all the emulator authors who are being flamed for not implementing whatever feature and not coming out with newer versions, biting the hand that they were lucky enough to be fed by; I would like to thank everyone who has visited this page and sent me an appreciative email, and everyone who has not sent any criticism (or stupid questions). Actually, so far none of you have said anything critical. Must just be the type of civilized audience that these progs appeal to ;)

TileView uses a rainbow palette (which I wasted a whole hour on perfecting) to make seeing tilemaps simpler. Fixes the problem with areas that are too dark to see and helps to visually separate elements. As games tend to group tiles of the same basic kind together, tiles of the same type have similar color hues. Now when looking through "Metroid 3", it is easy to distinguish the different parts, whereas before it was all just a mix of colors. It's also easier on the eyes than the default VGA.

For Willow and Cybergoth, SpriteView supports palette loading from savestates. It will be loaded into the user palette (replacing the default Zelda 3 palette) where you can then select a color group using + and -. For those who know nothing about how the SNES works, colors 0-127 are reserved for bg use while 128-255 are used for sprites. Note that I changed fine adjustment (by a single byte) to the keys Ctrl+(Left/Right).

Wrote a document to explain how the SNES scene is layered.

Yay, now I can make a map of one of my favorites, Mario RPG, now that the English version has been somehow copied. Wasn't making much progress on the other version, as I haven't learned Japanese (although it might be interesting to).
Sadly, the SEC has ended, but it was good while it lasted :(.

Fixed the GUI colors in SpriteView so that changing the palette would not affect everything else (at the expense of a few messed up colors in the viewing window).

Ever wanted to export the graphics of your favorite characters to use on your web page or maybe in your own game? I sure have, but until somebody asked for it, I wasn't ambitious enough to add it. Anyways, now BgMapper exports all of VRAM 4bpl graphics (which is what sprites are) to a large 128x1024 bitmap. Press '0' while in the graphics viewer or select it from the Scene export menu. Strange that no SNES emulators have such an option. Both SneMul and SneQr let you at least look at them, but alas no export feature.

Added goto file position in TileView.

Drew (or rather cut and pasted) a complete Metroid 3 map, the same one you see when you pause the game. It does not show where all the items are, but it does display all the rooms. So look in it and see if there is one you have not found.

Added BgMapper '-info' switch and raw scene palette exporting.

Improved the key scrolling control in TileView and added simple ASCII text mode.

Sorry that BgMapper did not upload right, but now its up and really does export screenshots. (:-) Yes, subscreen/mainscreen layering fixed. Add little messages to let you know what happens. Set key for merging screens of games that use transparency (since BgMapper does not support it). Should greatly improve viewing in some cases (press '7'). Allow mainscreens and subscreens to be toggled on/off.

Sounds like SpriteView can also, by coincidence, view TG16 and PCE graphics. Now if I just add bitmap exporting and palette importing to SV, it will be worth my effort of writing.

Added scene image exporting to a bitmap. Although it does not work quite how I'd like it to (saving each snapshot to the next file in sequence), it can at least save it to "bgsnap00.bmp". Just press '0'.

A little reference from Zophar's Domain and more than seven times the people came through in one weekend than had come through in the prior past two months. :) And best of all, I actually got some emails on it. So far none complaining about all its faults, but only suggestions for improvement. Now that I know what is important to you, I'll put scene exporting to images files the first thing.

BgMapper now uses a tile cache to speed up scene rendering by more than twice. Although there were not any problems with it in any of the savestates I looked in, tell me if you find one. The scene is now displayed first rather than you needing to select it from the menu.

SpriteView 1.2 supports viewing NES now, but so what when it can't edit anything, right? :)

TileView 0.25 now includes a numeric display mode, like a hex-editor. You still need an editor to actually change the data, but now you can at least see the values of colored blocks from within TileView (by pressing "m").

These utils are up on the SEC.
Fixed the mode 7 crash in BgMapper. I did not know about it until after it was uploaded.

Add two snapshots of FX graphics found in "StarFox" and "Yoshi's Island".
Add two more docs, one on pseudo 16x16 tiles and another on fx chip linear graphics.

Add the structure of the ZSNES savestate (meant to be compiled with NASM) to documents section.

This page comes into existence.