Chr2nam

NES Name Table Creator by Chris Covell, 
AmigaOS 4.0 copmile by Spot / Up Rough

CHR2NAM is a small utility that makes creating NES demos and games easier.
It creates a NAME table, a description of what tiles go on the NES' screen.
As its inputs, CHR2NAM takes a binary image of an NES' "screen" and matches
its graphics with data in a CHR-ROM file to generate the name table.

This is useful, and much quicker than laying out the graphics tile-by-tile
in some other program.  Do your work in a paint program, and just send it
through these small utilities.

Usage
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At the command line, type in CHR2NAM imagefile CHRfile NAMfile

The imagefile is the image that you want to convert into a nametable.
It should be 256x240 pixels, the same size as the NES' name table.
The image must also be in the NES' CHR format.  You can convert a RAW
binary image into this CHR format using my program, Raw2CHR.

The image must also be comprised of the same graphics, aligned at the same
8-pixel offset, as the CHR-ROM which you are using.  If not, CHR2NAM won't
be able to recognize the graphics to make a name table out of your image.

Now, the CHRfile is one background bank (256 tiles) of NES CHR data.  If
you have already made a CHR file out of your graphics, that's fine.  Just
specify that particular file on the command line.  If you haven't made
a CHR file from your graphics yet, you can make it using Raw2CHR and you
can compress it using CHARlie.  See the program flowchart for the steps
to making your CHR-ROM and name table from a single image file.

The output (NAMfile) is the name table, usually 960 bytes in size.  This
entire file can be placed in the PPU's name table area.


This program is just a small little utility, so I didn't spend (much) of a
time (at all) coding it.  As such, it is again in my favourite flavour of
spaghetti-code.  The C source code is included, if you want to improve on
it at all.