[Review] Famicom Disk System Tile/Character Editor

[segacd]

I bought this from ToToTek with a belt for my "new" FDS. I figured I'd save people some work and write a review myself about this very interesting piece!

(All they did was take a snapshot of the title screen and glue it on!)

(It skips the official "Nintendo Now Loading" screen! =O )

It is, except for a few Kanji (Chinese) symbols of course, is in full blown Japanese. Its actually quite easy to use. The menu is made up of a few categories which let you separately edit parts of the character map and titles stored on the disks. If you get stuck somewhere just press "reset" and it'll bring you back to the main menu! Pretty handy. Select also gets you back to the main menu most of the time. (I'll refer to picture modes or whatever you want to call the character art screens as "titles" FYI)



The first category translates to "Font" and basically lets you directly edit the character maps. Pushing start zooms you in so you can edit on a pixel by pixel basis. "A" places a pixel. Hold down "B" and an arrow key to shift through the mini-palette on the bottom of the screen.



(Note the "preview" at the bottom of the screen! These developers knew what they were doing!)

The second category translates to "Layout." (((thanks 133MHz))) When you go into it, it lets you edit a title with the character map. Press start and you can pick a character from the map. Use the arrow keys to select and press start to accept and go back to the title.

The third category translates to "Color." This lets you change the palette of the title. Press start and you can choose the color with the arrow keys. Hold "B" and move the arrows to define each palette (there are 12 available at once).



The fourth category translates to "Editor." This one is a little weird... it lets you edit the character map...but on a title screen. So I guess you can edit characters here so that you see how it effects the existing title and the final result? Start zooms in, "A" places pixels, and "B" +  a direction selects from the mini-palette at the bottom.



The fifth category translates to "Character." This lets you select between between four different character maps in memory and select between two titles in memory. When you select it, the first two selections (translate to "file A" and "file B") are loaded from disk, while the other two seem to be default/sample ones? Hold "B" + a direction to choose between the A and B choices on the side (the word in hiragana says "gamen" or "photo/picture" in English).



The sixth category translates to "Disk." This is the most dangerous, but useful one. The first selection (says "yomu" and translates to "read" in English) lets you read from ANY disk you put in the drive. Click on this and a sub-category will appear. The first selection lets you load a character map and the other lets you load a title. Click on one and a prompt will show up. Hit a button again. At this time, insert your disk. It will load and then show a list of all character map/picture files on disk (by filename). Click on one to load it. Now its fully loaded! IMPORTANT!!! The second selection (says "kaku" translates to "write" in English) lets you write files to disk. I am afraid to use this and haven't...but I'm sure it works similarly to the read function... The third selection is the worst. THIS FORMATS THE DISK! (translates to "format" obviously). I do not know if it only destroys character maps/titles or the entire disk, but DON'T USE IT ON A DISK YOU LIKE!







The last category says "Sabu"...maybe translates to "save"... who knows? But this basically is for erasing. The first selection (which translates to "clear") deletes things from (internal) RAM...the first sub-selection erases the character map memory and literally translates to "File Killer," the second deletes the titles and translates to "Picture Killer", the other two do similar stuff but I'm too lazy to see exactly. The other main selections are pretty generic...clearing stuff and setting back to defaults, etc. The last selection FORMATS A DISK! BE WARY!



And that's basically it! Pretty cool, eh? Now go out there and make some bootlegs!

[133MHz]

Excellent! The pictures are quite good for a CRT TV screen, too! Everything's readable and the pictures aren't obnoxiously large either.

2nd category: レイアウト means Layout.

I'd love to have this program in my collection. Is it really true that it can't be copied?

[ericj]

I thought the same thing, so I tried copying it with a handful of different copy utilities, but I couldn't get it to write to the target disk--every time, Error 26. I tried multiple disks (yep, disks I had just recently written to), but no luck. I even tried to dump it with my MGD1 but couldn't get it to dump.  I'll have a fdsloadr disk drive dump cable built in a week or so, so I'll try it and let you know.

[segacd]

Excellent! The pictures are quite good for a CRT TV screen, too! Everything's readable and the pictures aren't obnoxiously large either.

2nd category: レイアウト means Layout.

I'd love to have this program in my collection. Is it really true that it can't be copied?

Yeah...I don't know. I got that Daewoo flat-CRT for dirt cheap back in like 2003, but it has the best comb filter I've ever seen! It makes everything look amazing.
I have my Famicom connected to a Betamax actually. xDDDDDD Its strange though...It picks up the Famicom well on channel 60!

Thanks for that correction! Will fix! I'm obviously not a native speaker. Haha.

I just started my collection of Famicom stuff so I don't have anyway to dump these disks. You'll just have to take Ericj's word. xD

[Mooliecool]

I got my hands one of these... well I just ordered it, also can't you dump it with disk keeper? it bypasses security thing's