NES specific tool (NAW)
Printed From: Pixel Joint
Category: The Lounge
Forum Name: Resources and Support
Forum Discription: Help your fellow pixel artists out with links to good tutorials, other forums, software, fonts, etc. Bugs and support issues should go here as well.
URL: https://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=27430
Printed Date: 11 September 2025 at 10:12pm
Topic: NES specific tool (NAW)
Posted By: nesrocks
Subject: NES specific tool (NAW)
Date Posted: 08 September 2022 at 3:17pm
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NES Assets Workshop (NAW) is a tool that I've developed for making strictly NES compatible graphics. As a proof you have a simple export ROM button.
Get it here (portable, no instalation, requires Windows) https://nesrocks.itch.io/naw 
I started working on it because I wanted something more artist friendly than the available tools and it grew from there. If you're not familiar with how the NES works there is a compact tutorial that opens by default that actually contains a lot of info, but in short the NES is a tile and palette based system. On the left side of NAW you have the screen where you place background tiles, and on the right you have the tileset. It is available for free, but you're welcome to pay any amount you'd like. Donations are very important for me as I'd like to work on this full time, and it won't take much to get to that point. On that note, you can also support me on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/bitinkstudios Hope you enjoy it! Any questions you can contact me on twitter. If you make some art (safe for work?) I'd love to see it! Just tag me and I can retweet it! https://twitter.com/bitinkstudios |
Replies:
Posted By: Trigonomicon
Date Posted: 09 September 2022 at 2:34pm
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I started playing around with this a bit. It's taking me a bit of getting used to, especially since I'm not 100% familiar with NES hardware restrictions, but it feels pretty good to use so far! I'm definitely gonna have to try to make something with this!
(also, your example screenshots are gorgeous!) |
Posted By: nesrocks
Date Posted: 09 September 2022 at 3:09pm
Thank you for trying it! I hope you get used to it fast. 
I'm interested to know what are the very first hurdles, the things that don't seem to make sense for a first time user. I imagine the lack of a cursor may be a problem. The bulk of the work is done with the pen and tile tools, so having a cursor to make it more clear which tool is active might improve usability. ps.: I can't set my avatar, on the gallery there's no "set avatar" link. Oh well. |
Posted By: Trigonomicon
Date Posted: 10 September 2022 at 11:11am
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Well most things was fairly easy to figure out after a few minutes of messing around, like how the palette worked by each 16x16 square. And I feel like confusing the tile tool and the select tool a few times was squarely on me. One thing that took a bit of figuring out though was that you needed to drag and drop sprites rather than just selecting and clicking like with nametable tiles. If you want to make that easier for noobs, maybe just expand the tooltip for the sprite tool a bit to explain it. To set your avatar on PJ you need to upload a piece of art to your gallery that's at most 64x64 big, then you should be able to click "Make this my avatar" under it. |
Posted By: nesrocks
Date Posted: 12 September 2022 at 6:04pm
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Thank you, avatar done ^^
I think it does make sense to have the sprite tool work by doing the same action as the tile tool. The result won't be the same though. Once you select some tiles and then click and drag on the screen area it will create a sprite and it'll start dragging it around until it is released. That's different than the tile tool, that plots several copies of the tile, but having them activate the same way is certainly less confusing. |