Looking for any and all information on hacking Castlevania II.

[TheWhipperSnapper]

Ok let me give you a little bit of skinny as to what I have been doing. I have been attempting to edit Castlevania II using Cursed by NeverObselete, TileMolester and Simon's Quest Redacted patch by Almighty Guru. I have hit a wall. Basically I have a lot of ideas of what I would like to do. I go through these phases of being really inspired then I lose interest because who knows why, boredom, redundancy, lack of ideas or inspiration or stress in my life and I stop fooling with this stuff. However I always come back to doing it. I have ideas and I need them to be out there in pixelated form. So what I want to do is harvest all of the graphics I can to make an interesting rom hack of CVII. What I have been finding is that unless the Rom is written in a certain way I can not place certain graphics in places where I want them. For example. I want to put mermen in the mansions however this can not be done because they take up 4 squares or should I say 4 four by four 8 bit metatiles I.E. one set for the head, one for the legs moving, one for the head with mouth open and then one more for the legs moving again. There are no enemies that follow that pattern design wise. They usually go one for the head and two for the leg animations. I hope this makes sense.
I would like to know how to change that. 

The roms graphic tiles are so scrambled that even with the aforementioned utilities it's still a chore. Take a look at Dr Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde for the NES. If you open up that rom with Tile Molester you don't have to interleave to get tiles assembled they already are fully assembled already. No fuss no muss. Or for that matter if you open up Castlevania III in Tile Molester you can see there is a section for enemies only which is not separated by background graphics or Simon's animation like in Castlevania II. If you use Tile Molester you will know what I mean. I know that in the NES's hay day programmers probably did that to mind space limits and to prevent piracy. Now however one should be able to write a game without having to mind limits. Drawing an 8 bit character should be done where you can see each frame head and upper body connected to the lower body without splitting up the graphics or having to rely on Tile Molester's interleave utility to assemble them.
It should be simple.

In any case I am looking for any documents for writing the ROM to make certain graphic get rendered in the places that they should be so that if I need a certain enemy or character or background in a specific place I have that. Also I notice that Castlevania II scrolls freely in all directions specifically on stairs or with long jumps to much lower areas. Is there a way to make it scroll horizontally and vertically? Or lfor that matter can the rom be edited so that when you go up stairs at the top of screen or down stairs at the bottom a new screen with different graphics. This game is similar in it's free scrolling to that of Bionic Commando. But unlike Commando if you go in a door you find a new set of graphics waiting rather than the same regurgitated filth in this game.

So please if anyone has any information on how to do anything, add enemies or bosses, add stairs, replace graphics, change game attributes, change the scrolling tendencies, anything to make the game the way it could be please let me know. 

P.S. I need a good copy of castl2tutor. The one I downloaded from this site I can not seem to open with any of my text editing programs.

Thank you.

[Dwedit]

What do you mean the "Tiles are scrambled"?  Sounds like you're just using the wrong tile editors or using the wrong mode.



Use YY-CHR, and select "8x16 tile mode".  Then you can't complain about the tiles being scrambled.

[Gil Galad]

Tile Layer Pro also has a tile aranger where you can move tiles to the window and piece them together so that you can see what you're editing. Most games have the CHR-ROM tiles scrambled because they are optimized to use less CHR-ROM space as possible. Usually, any duplicate tiles are removed for a smaller tileset.

[TheWhipperSnapper]

I have done what you guys said. What I am saying if you open up Jeckyll and Hyde and look how much more organized the tiles are. I am saying not so much in the way of sprites but the backgrounds are scrambled. If you used the Revamped Editor for CV 3 the tiles for backgrounds and sprites are almost completely drawn so you don't even have to assemble them.

Thanks for you replies.