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Beginners > Text backgrounds... how???

#131044 - Diirewolf - Sun Jun 10, 2007 2:17 pm

Ok my current goal is to write a simple demo sidescroller on the gba. I have much experience with the gba and sprites (i.e. OAM) but I never understood the way in which text backgrounds work. Can someone point me to a GOOD tutorial which explains them in detail including things like tilebase and mapbase and when/how to use these with tiled backgrounds as I have very little idea on how they work, each tutorial says something different about them.
I am also looking for a way to scroll the background i.e. not just wrap scrolling the background i mean scrolling then drawing the next row/column of the map (which is larger than the bg) as I have observed in some sidescroller gba games using VBA.
I also want to know what tools to use from tile image conversion to map making and exporting, again each tutorial uses something different.
Thanks!

#131045 - keldon - Sun Jun 10, 2007 3:06 pm

Behold: http://www.coranac.com/tonc/text/toc.htm

#131060 - Diirewolf - Sun Jun 10, 2007 7:03 pm

Ok I have looked at the site and I learned some things about the tile and map bases. Now for the scrolling I didn't really get anywhere by looking at the site so I remembered that devkitPro comes wid examples so I looked at their scrolling example but to my surprise it was not what I was looking for. If you want to see what I am looking for open up a sidescroller game rom in vba and open up the map viewer and check how it scrolls. Now I tried over and over again to get something like that scrolling algorithm going and it actually worked after many tries and much thinking (and some fiddling with new map editors). Ill upload the rom of my successful try at a scrolling algorithm (very inefficient though) and the tiles were downloaded off some random site i found and the conversion process wasnt exactly a success (ull c what I mean):
http://www.mytempdir.com/1351993
Finally got it to work but still am fighting with the tile/map conversions etc. to get them proper.