Nostalgic Assets Workshop: NAW

Make your art on the PC, see it on the NES!

NAW is a modern tool that enables the creation of art ready for use with NES development. Meant for artists, it imposes all NES limitations and gives you a WYSIWYG workflow.

You can export the screen created into a small working NES ROM at the click of a single button.

Key features:

• NES based workflow: tilemaps (nametables), indexed colors (palettes), tilesets (CHR pages). What you do is automatically what the NES can do.
  
• Sprites editor! Add, delete, move and flip all sprites on the screen, in 8x8 and 8x16 modes.
• Draw directly in the sprites layer in 8x8 mode (must start from all empty sprites).
• Write tool! Assign tiles to keys and then just type away! Supports cursor movement, setting a rectangle area, and loading/saving tbl files.
• Sprite overflow simulation and flicker simulation!
• Copy and paste bitmap data to and from other programs using the clipboard! Whenever the image has more than 4 colors, NAW will automatically reduce the color count.
• Draw with pencil on CHRs or directly on nametables, with live update of every instance of the edited tile.
• Load PNG images for reference.
  
• Support for NESMaker BMP files (import/export)!

Version 0.522 improvements:

Version v0.527 contains several hotfixes.

Early Access features:

• Resize maps and tilesets. The ROM exporter supports big tilesets by using MMC3 mid-frame splits, automatically calculated.
• 16x8, 8x8 and 8x1 attribute modes. New attributes not available on the ROM exporter yet.
• Convert an image into NES assets (nam + chr + palette). Careful: big images will take a long time to process!
• Import tiles from a NES ROM. Maximum size is limited for now. Works best on CHR-ROM games.

Other big new features (Free and Early Access):

• Projects now default to .naw.png extension so they are nice cards that you can see in your file explorer without having to open them. Editing the png on another tool will delete the project data, so if you don't feel safe you can save as .naw. Sending the .naw.png project over discord works fine as of now.
• Revamped UI. Much, much more responsive.
  
• New and revised tutorials.
• Blur filter for visualization.
• Overscan images (thanks go to Mrmo Tarius).
• Vastly improved Tilemap (nametable) rendering performance. (thanks go to jroweboy).
• Unified Map exporter. Unified Colors exporter.
• Sprites are editable on the Tilemap module with the Sprite tool.
• BG Tiles are editable on the Sprites modile with the Tile tool.
• Configurable ignored colors when using the Selection and Tile tools.
• Configurable automatic Screenshots. Look in Preferences.
• Configurable automatic Project Backups. Look in Preferences.
• Automatically loads the last project on startup. Also useful for unexpected program terminations.
• Streamer mode: adds visual cues to the cursor and actions.
• Preset UI Themes with color schemes.
• Configurable update warning (off by default).
• Improved ROM exporter.
• Edit the number of maps per project (too many maps may cause slowdown).
• New asset tracker in the UI for easier map and tileset navigation.
• Control + TAB hotkey to navigate the maps in the Map module. Shift reverses.
• Supports importing .act palettes.
• Added a configurable attribute viewer overlay to highlight attributes in the Tilemap. "Numpad ," hotkey.
• And countless small improvements and fixes! 

Known issues:

•  when copying a stamp from the Tilemap the cursor shows attribute 0 instead of the full color stamp. Pasting it works correctly.

This was a lot of work to do! If you find any issues please report. I'm sure there will be some, despite testing it tirelessly. I hope you enjoy the big list of new features!

The philosophy behind NAW is to bridge the gap between artists and coders, while using established NES development art asset formats and nomenclatures. 

Workflow for artists, output for coders!