Programs / Tilemap Viewer

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Tilemap View 1.9.4
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TileView displays the byte/word arrays in a file as colored blocks to aid in finding tilemap patterns, including levels, map screens, and other anamolies. It's like a visual hex editor (minus the 'editor' aspect), that instead of showing hex numbers, shows their colors. Although it can actually view any file, it specially recognizes ZSNES savestates and sets the file position to the base of WRAM (SNES work memory). So far, I've found the tilemaps in the savestates of several games with the tiny program, including Zelda, Mario World, Yoshi's Island, Mario All-Stars, Secret of Mana, Metroid 3, and Donkey Kong Country.

If you are interested in editing your finds, you might use TileView to find them and a hex-editor to change them, like Hex Workshop by Breakpoint Software. There are also different viewing modes to find other types of entities, and by coincidence, TileView can also view SNES mode 7 tiles and FX chip graphics.

News

2022-01-27:

TileView 1.9.4

• Highlight pressable keys in status bar with cyan.
• Add popup dialog for unit bitmask.
• Change bitmask keys from '+' '-' to '>' '<', which resembles >> and << in C..
• Fix 'U' key cycling through units to include 32-bit (only went up to 16).
• Display small arrows for current orientation to clarify.
• Colored numbers now display with shaded outline to make them easier to see against background, and they retain a square shape regardless of unit size to make it easier to see structures, because wide blocks distorted them.

2021-11-11:

TileView 1.9.2

• Supports any element bit size 1-32, including 24-bit elements, and even non-powers of two like 3-bit or 12-bit elements.
• Press 'o' to cycle through all 8 possible 2D orientations (normal, horizontally mirrored, vertically mirrored, diagonal...).
• Press 'e' to toggle endianness between increasing(LE)/decreasing(BE).
• Press 'u' now to type unit size in directly by pressing 'u' instead of cycling through them all.
• Press 'w' now to type wrap width in directly instead of resizing (e.g. "64"+Enter).
• Removed 'Del' key to write new element value to file since it was dangerous (no save) and didn't work completely anyway (only supported uint8 and uint16).
• Included a very simple Windows port (consider it a preview, as it basically just wraps the old program inside a fixed size window so you don't need to run DOSBox, but no mouse support or menus or any other improvements, except larger window size).
• Added 1:1 pixels mode (not just 4x4 colored blocks).

2000-08-10:

TileView 1.8.5 - minor
Added colored backgrounds behind numbers in hexview. It should make correlating what you see in the block mode to the what you see in hex view much easier.

Screenshots