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Is there a way to capture the name table as an image periodically? This would be really useful for creating level maps of games, vs taking screen shots manually over and over. I thought maybe it could be done using FCEUDX and Lua script but i didn't see any image saving functionality

You could hide sprites and just take a screenshot.

If you mean you want a shot of the 4 internal nametables rendered at some scanline like in the Nametable viewer, then no that doesn't exist currently.

You could in theory write a lua script to peek at the all the current PPU data and render an image based on it in response to a keypress or whatever trigger you want to hook up.

Less directly, in interim builds of FCEUX you can use the hex editor to dump PPU memory to file. (Can't remember if you could do that in earlier builds or not, it might be there too.)

An even less direct approach might be Biswit's animation merging tool: https://bisqwit.iki.fi/source/animmerger.html

rainwarrior wrote:An even less direct approach might be Biswit's animation merging tool: https://bisqwit.iki.fi/source/animmerger.html

this is basically what I would really like to do.. play through the game and end up with a map "automagically" rendered. Looks like to get the source images for that project, they had a modified emulator which would output every frame as an image.

this looks promising though of course i dont run linux so i cant use these scripts even if i could produce the source images


I tried just taking screen shots and it's super tedious

frantik wrote:of course i dont run linux so i cant use these scripts

Running Linux in VirtualBox is pretty easy, and free. As for the images, many emulators can record video, and you can use VirtualDub to convert the video into a series of images.

Yeah I suppose it could be done! I might try that route.. anybody know a good minimal Linux distribution to use these days?

frantik wrote:this looks promising though of course i dont run linux so i cant use these scripts even if i could produce the source images

there's a win32 build at the bottom of the page

rainwarrior wrote:

frantik wrote:this looks promising though of course i dont run linux so i cant use these scripts even if i could produce the source images

there's a win32 build at the bottom of the page

Oh nice.. I guess I didn’t look hard enough. Thanks

I tried it out but it doesn't seem to work too well unfortunately when I try to filter out the HUD it goes haywire too

What it should look like


The generated image


It's missing some major features.. though honestly just using the raw frames might be easier than screen capping a bunch of times, though it'd still be pretty tedious.

edit.. yeah, that program isn't gonna work unfortunately

Which rom hack is that? I'd like to see if I can get sensible results with the same tools.

I believe it's Extra Mario Bros.
https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/369/

yes it's extra mario bros... I'm wondering if all the black space is causing problems, plus the stars are animated. i ran it on a few sets of images and it seems like it was tracking mario more than the background. I don't think that tool is the solution I'm looking for, but it was a nice idea.

If I could just capture the name table as a long image as it gets updated that would be really cool but i don't think it's that easy

Instead of using that program to merge the images, I've started using photoshops "Photo Merge" feature which isn't perfect but saves a lot of time since it can "snap" matching shapes into place when it doesnt get it right automatically

I record an AVI using raw video, then take that into VirutalDub, were I set it to only give me 2 frames a second (decimate by 30).. then I cherry pick frames which will allow me to build the room, import those into photoshop and use the merge tool. It's still slow but a lot faster than screen shotting every room and then stitching every image together manually

This game is a lot more fun once you start to understand the maps..