Hello,

First I apologize if my english is bad, because I'm french and english is difficult for me to write so I try m best.

I'm not sure that my post is in the right place so I'm sorr if I mistake on the categorie.

I'm asking for help to extract maps inside a Snes Rom because I'm a "soluce maker" and I try to make the best soluces for RPG game like "Tales of Phantasia" "Secret of evermore" but it take me very long time to build maps by taking screen with an emulator (I use Zsnes) and building them with Photoshop. I spend almost an entire 2 month of work to only build maps for "Tales of phantasia". So I'm searching over the net to see if someone know a little program to extract maps more easly.

So I doesn't know if this is possible or if a tool already exist but maybe someone here ould help me.

I thanks you to had take time to read this post.

Thanks to all and have a nice day. 

Salent

I'm understanding but I want to make soluce for many RPG game so it maybe more usefull for me to have an universal program whitch work for every Snes Rom, or like you say I must team up with a Rom hacker to help me ... but that may be a work for years ^^ (there is many RPG Rom).

So I think I continu searching but if I doesn't find anything I follow your words, thanks BRPXQZME.

Just out of curiosity... what is a "soluce" exactly? Is it a guide, or maybe an FAQ? A cheat code? Didn't show up in any French dictionaries (not translation engines) I looked at.

A "soluce" is a sort of complete guide to finish a game with 100% of the secret. For exemple this is one of my work (but it is in french) : http://www.snes-fr.com/soluce_supernintendo_483_wonder-project-j---kikai-no-shounen-pino.html

It was a *.doc (word) document at the beginning but it was transformed to make it easier to open for anybody.

Yes that the right word ... I'm sorry for my bad english  :'( I try my best but I need to learn more words.

DLH.net uses "solution" as the translation for "Lösung" ... I don't know if it's used like that in English, too.

Every game is going to have a different format for something like that. The best you could get is one program for each game you want to look at, but even doing one game is going to be a considerable amount of work.

In general, this cannot be done with a generic tool. Each game stores it's map data in a way that is particular to it's own custom game engine and any map rendering program has to be specifically written to parse that format.

That said, there are some options. If the map format is documented and you have some programming ability, you could write such a tool. (For example, I have written one for SMB Special to help with a project I'm part of.) If you plan on doing many such projects, a well designed program could be generic enough to allow for additional games with only the addition of a new map data parser.

Another option for those without the skills to write their own map renderer is to use programs written by others. If the game you're working with has had a level editor written for it, you should be able to use it to capture screenshots of larger areas at once, if not the whole map.

Beyond that, I'm not sure there's much else you can do. With console games, especially for older systems, pretty much all the data is in a format specific to that game, so generic tools to manipulate that data don't exist. (There are exceptions, but map data isn't one of them.)