feasibility of having a game editor run on the SNES itself

[psycopathicteen]

I had this idea earlier today of having a cart with a large amount of battery save RAM, and a small amount of ROM, allowing you to edit itself. It could have a graphics editor, a level editor, and the ability to animate the enemy and object behavior frame by frame, like an animated cartoon.

[rainwarrior]

Why stop there? Put a text editor and compiler on it!

[tepples]

It's possible, and it exists. Athena released the vertical shmup maker Dezaemon for Famicom and Super Famicom. The big limit is that all the sprites, maps, and AIs that the user creates have to fit in PRG RAM, which tops out at 32 KiB for the Famicom (SXROM) and 128 KiB for the Super Famicom.

[rainwarrior]

Why does it have to top out? Couldn't you build a board with RAM banking, and probably flashable ROM as well?

[tepples]

Because the SNES PowerPak, Super EverDrive, etc. might need to be modified to support emulating a board with flashable ROM. That and the fact that there's a dwindling supply of Super NES Mouse controllers for efficiently drawing in the editor unless someone manages to make the oft-suggested PS/2 to Super NES adapter.

[MottZilla]

Some games actually had editors that ran on the system. Mega Man X and Super Metroid come to mind. I think the subject of making game editing tools for making levels and things that ran on a NES has come up before. I think the idea was for some people it might be easier to make a level builder on the NES than to program one that runs on the PC.

I recall reading but don't recall the accuracy that Super Metroid had a "Demo Recorder" that actually attempts to write to ROM, suggesting that on some Nintendo development systems that the cartridge ROM area was writable by the game itself.

[psycopathicteen]

Woah, that is interesting! Is that what the mysterious "debug mode" in Sonic 1 was for?

[benjaminsantiago]

To me it makes more sense to use a tile/sound/graphic editor on PC, and then be able to upload to the system itself. Or to
save some kind of specialized debugging for the system itself. Not sure how things like famitracker work on the backend, but it would be cool to have,say, some kind of way to write a song on PC in a familiar environment and then have a player on the SNES where you could mute/solo different channels, or go back and forth.

Tools like photoshop (for me anyway) are pretty robust and it seems like you'd have to do a lot of work to emulate some of their functionality on SNES, stuff like layers, undo, and using marquee to select and copy large areas is pretty convenient. I remember loving the stamp creator thing in mario paint though.

I haven't read it with any degree of seriousness but there is pretty good documentation for the quickdev16

https://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/quickdev16

and the psygnosis dev cart

http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/1022/

[tepples]

A tile editor that runs on the Super NES allows previewing in real time what composite encoding artifacts will do to your tiles. Otherwise, you have to have the computer, its monitor, the Super NES Control Deck, and its monitor all in the same room, with some sort of serial cable between the two.

[Kasumi]

I'm reminded of this: RPG Maker for Super Famicom. There's one for Game Boy Color and a bunch of other consoles. I feel like the idea of these things is always much cooler than actually using them.

[tepples]

If you have a Nintendo DS, you must DIY! (Or else you will die.)

[benjaminsantiago]

A tile editor that runs on the Super NES allows previewing in real time what composite encoding artifacts will do to your tiles. Otherwise, you have to have the computer, its monitor, the Super NES Control Deck, and its monitor all in the same room, with some sort of serial cable between the two.

I actually happened across a small security-type monitor that I used to keep on my desk to test games once I put them on my power pak (waiting to get an ever drive with USB). I've been thinking about getting a Supaboy or something so that I could have my set up "on the go"

[psycopathicteen]

This would work well with animating multijointed bosses, since you can drag sprites with the cursor.