Hi.  I'm wanting to take some screen shots of the pattern tables in nesticle.  Problem is whenever I do alt-print screen, I just get a picture of a black screen when I paste it in paint or ifran view.  I could just use fceuxd, but the ppu viewer is different than nesticle's pattern tables in the same spot in the game.

I'm writing a doc on how to find, rearrange and assign different palettes to backround graphics for a Tecmo Super Bowl fan site.  I couldn't find any docs about this, so I decided to write my own.  I'm going to include two methods, getting the hex values in nesticle and dumping the ppu in nesten.

Maybe the game swaps graphics banks mid-screen?
In which case, you'd want to have FCEUXD refresh the PPU Viewer window on a different scanline than the default value of 0 (the top of the screen).
The NES screen is 240 lines vertically. So pick a value about where your graphics are on the screen. (if it's halfway up the screen, the value you want is half of 240, or 120).

Wow, what a nasty way to program. I guess with a limited PPU you can accomplish things with workarounds such as this.

You must never have looked in-depth at many NES games.

As far as tricks and techniques go -- CHR swapping mid-frame is as basic as it gets (and somewhat expected -- I'd wager at least half of the games that use swappable CHR-ROM do it at some point)