Well, when I posted about the need for a mapper upgrade yesterday, I got right to work, and it actually took next to nothing to implement.

See, my assembler of choice is ca65. I thought I was going to have to rearrange the configuration file that I use. As luck would have it, I didn’t have to at all because of the way I build my .NES files using the copy command with the binary switch within Windows itself. In effect, all I had to do was change the header, and put more graphic files in the copy command, enough to fill up the 32kb of CHR. Since I have all this room now, I’ve got a couple of graphic ideas that might be kind of cool. We’ll see!

So getting the actual bankswitching to work wasn’t a big deal after doing it. It wasn’t very hard to implement it after a few of my buddies showed me how easy it is to do. The hard part came in the form of the image that my buddy Dave made for me. He had sent the zombie thing to me in the form of an iNES image, so I had to grab the data out of it and all that good stuff. Thankfully hex editors are great for this kind of thing hehe The only thing I really had to do was change the attributes. The way he made the image spread it across over the 4 background palettes, but I needed at least one for the Sly Dog Studios logo to go on the title screen. After a bit of fiddling, here are the images side-by-side:

Turned out really nice I think! The only differences are that the blood on the zombie is darker now, and the lack of blood next to the bulging eye. I think the latter is hardly noticeable unless you’re really looking for it though. Everything went swimmingly!