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).
• A simple tutorial project is loaded as default at startup. You may turn this off in preferences or replace the project file in NAW's folder with a project of your choosing (bins\SampleProj-001.naw).
• 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 0.5 (Early Access) main new features:

• NAW is now Nostalgic Assets Workshop! It installs to a new folder so you may uninstall the older version manually.
• Tools: Revamped the code for the brush and stamp tools allowing for many new features!
• Tools: Set a Draw Style to the Brush, Line, Rectangle, Ellipse and Paint Bucket tools: regular, checkerboard, vertical lines and horizontal lines.
• Tools: Added Rounded/Square toggle to the drawing tools.
• Tools: Added a Draw BG color toggle. You can now select an area of pixels and paste as if the BG color is transparent just by disabling the BG color draw.
• Tools: Much more precise attribute drawing. Previously attributes were applied to the Map in a big rectangular area. Most noticeable when using the line, ellipse or brush tools on the Map area.
• Tools: No more wrap around when pasting stamps and tiles at the edge of the Map or the Tileset. You can also partially place stamps and tools outside the edges of the canvas by panning first.
• Tools: Added diagonal fill option to the paint bucket. This allows the fill to pass through diagonally touching pixels. Great for painting dithered areas.
• Helpers: Added 4 tutorials to a "Tutorials" menu. Moved the old tutorial there as a 5th "Overview" tutorial. Created a simpler "Welcome" project.
• Helpers: Added an attribute view toggle: disabled, dimmed and full. It is drawn on top of the map. Hotkey: "numpad .".
• Filters: Added a configurable blur filter for visualization. Does not affect the image itself. Toggle with F9.
• Interface: UI resolution is now scalable. Pressing "Control +" or "Control -" will change the UI resolution in integer steps. Also available on the "View" menu. The scalable UI allows the Map and Tileset areas to display more data, so now the Map and the Tileset can be panned freely inside those areas. As a consequence, it is now much easier to draw or select at the edge of the canvases.
• Interface: Added two new UI color themes. Can be changed in the top bar under "Misc" (restarts NAW, so save your project first).
• Palettes: significant improvements made to the Palette module and palettes in general.
• And a lot more! View the full change log here

Planned features:

• 16x8, 8x8, 8x1 and per pixel map attributes modes.
• Multiple Maps, Tilesets and Palettes per project.
• Metatiles editor and management.
  
• Metatile based level editor.
• Metasprites editor and management.
• Metasprite animation editor and management.
• Tileset animation with preview.
• CRT shader preview and aspect ratio.
• Palette cycle animation preview.
• Scanline tricks preview.
• Linux and Mac builds.
• And more!

The ultimate goal is to make NAW a central place to manage all of the visual art assets on a NES development project.

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!