Help Support SNESMaps.com

For Super Nintendo games I use either the ZSNES or SNES9x emulator. Then I take screen shots of the game using the "Alt" + "Print Screen" button to capture the emulator screen to the clipboard. From there I past it into Photoshop. I have a file with a selection saved that crops out the game screen from the emulator interface. From there I past it into the map file I am creating. Using layers, I assemble the various screen shots together forming the map.

For some games I will go through taking multiple screen shots of the same area. Some games have several layers that move at different rates as you progress through the level. For these games I need to map out each layer separately. Then I need to cut out the parts from the higher layers where you can see through to layers underneath. This can be a very time consuming process depending on how complex the layer is. For example in Super Metroid for the Space Colony map I needed to cut out hundreds of little sections that made up the fence you can see through. After all the layers for a level are assembled in Photoshop then I need to go back through and get all the sprits for the enemies or any other items that were not included in the background or foreground layers.

In addition to working straight from screen shots from the game I also use vSNES to create some maps. This is a very useful tool for mapping games that works with ZSNES save state files. Once the save state file is loaded into vSNES you go toggle between different background layers to view different parts of the level you are in. Some games like Super Mario Kart you can capture the entire map for a level in one screen shot. Other games like F-Zero are a bit trickier. That game takes many screen shots, and often those shots need to be fixed because parts of the image will be on the left side that needs to be moved over to the right and so forth.

Once I finish the map in Photoshop I add the copyright information and sometimes a ledged for the map. Then I save out the map as a .png file. I find that format takes up the least amount of space and there is no loss in image quality using that format. I then use a program called PNGGauntlet to compress the .png file to an even smaller file size to make it load faster on the web.

This process takes a varying amount of time depending on the size of the map and the complexity of the area being mapped. The easiest games to map are games like Super Mario Kart where I can capture the entire map in one screen shot using vSNES.

One of the more complex games to map for the Super Nintendo is Super Metroid due to all the different layers.

Some games are not that hard to map such as Lufia II, however do to the large number of areas it can take many months of hard dedicated work to complete mapping a game like that.