Porno-graphic

[Raccoon Sam]

CROSS-POST FROM RHDN:

The folks at Baddesthacks.net and I are proud to announce Porno-Graphic, a new tile editor currently in development by BHDN true-believers manwithcatears, el kadong, and myself. What's special about Porno-Graphic is how it processes tile data through custom XML "profiles". Unlike currently existing tile editors which limit you to a sampling of hard-coded "codecs" for popular systems, Porno-Graphic profiles give you full control over the tile format for the ROM you are hacking, from tile dimensions to bitplanes, allowing you to edit games that render their tiles in unconventional ways never before supported by popular tile editors. 

The Porno-Graphic profile format is powerful but straightforward. Simple tile formats are easy to lay out, complex ones are also doable, and the crazy ones are finally possible.

Profiles can also contain definitions for more than one tile format. Some profiles, particularly the ones for various arcade systems, contain "regions" that define parameters for individual games for that hardware and allow you to define tile data that is composited from multiple ROMs at the same time. This effectively opens the floodgates to a new age of arcade ROM hacks. As an example, this is what it looks like to load tiles for a CPS1 game. The standard CPS1 sprite tile format is selected. Note that the user can control the starting offset for a section of tile data to load, as well as the byte length. 




(Rotation tool was added for editing arcade games designed for a vertical monitor mount.)

And here is a screenshot from the same game, but with the non-standard 32x32 background tile size selected at the Import window. 



Rather than redoing all this work every time you want to open up your ROM for editing, Porno-Graphic has a project file system that contains any sets of tile you have imported, as well as tile arrangements (more on this at a later date) and palettes. You will be able to manually create a palette, import a palette from popular editing software formats (GIMP, Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, etc.), import a palette from a known format in a ROM, or from a dump of Video RAM in MAME's debugger. At the moment, rudimentary pixel editing is planned, but the long-term goal is to include a comprehensive export/import system so that the bulk of graphics editing can be done on third party editors without any of the usual hiccups involved with other editors that are out there.

Right now a lot is left to be implemented, but the focus right now is to lay the right foundation for the broader scope of this project. We want Porno-Graphic to be the most powerful tile editor ever created and we will stop at nothing to achieve this.


Oh yeah, it also supports Neo-Geo.

Looks very interesting and it's on GitHub. I can't compile a binary so I can't verify if it runs on Mono, but I think this has insane potential.
What do you think?