I have been attacking the SD2 (SoM) over world again.

My goal is to figure out the original formatting the over world was in while the Square/(Enix?) development team was working on the game.

This time it took 8 continuous hours roughly of processing to breakdown the raw image dump.

Apparently, the SD2 mode7 over world appears to use a 96 color palette with 4x2 tiles; Plus I still have yet to take 4 way mirroring into account.

This will take a couple more weeks of additional processing before I am done with my analysis though.

 :banghead:

Why don't you just make a savestate while on the overworld and open up VSNES? That would probably let you discover a large amount of information very quickly. That's what I would do. That program is a great time saver when trying to figure out how a screen is put together. The only thing it can't handle is certain HDMA effects for obvious reasons. Mode7 should be covered and covered well though.

I don't know what you're talking about... You have some severe misconceptions.

1. Mode 7 graphics utilize a full 256 color palette. One byte per pixel like a bitmap file. Each tile pixel can use any of the 256 colors.
2. All tiles are 8x8 in size, including the trees, houses, etc. Objects that APPEAR smaller than 8x8 are typically centered in the tile with grass filling the rest. I've looked at the game. That's how the graphics are stored and that's how the screen is constructed.
3. Frames? Frames should have nothing to do with it. The map is a static image. The perspective is manipulated by the Mode 7 registers, but the map is static.
4. The screen (technically background layer) is constructed with a 128x128 grid of 8x8 tiles. It's 1024x1024 pixels in size.

During the development, artists would either draw the full image outright OR construct it via tiles the entire over world image resulting in one 1024x1024 canvas image via a custom tool developed by the development team. Artists would never work with anything less than an 8x8 tile. Any object appearing smaller than 8x8 as still drawn in an 8x8 square and the surrounding pixels were filled to blend with the background or surrounding tiles.

I'm telling you, open a savestate in VRAM and look for yourself. That's how they are. Once you see the tiles in the memory viewer, you'll understand.

Such as?

Ah, in that case, it looks as though there are 4 frames of animation for those tiles. All are preloaded into VRAM and show up in VSNES as far as I can tell. Snow, mushrooms, water, and tree animation seem to all be there.