Hello all!
I don't know if it's allowed, but I present you a PC application, which allows you to convert your graphics for your GBA / DS and edit maps.
GBA Graphics is an easy-to-use graphical tool to convert any graphic (BMP, PNG, TIF, JPG, GIF) for your Game Boy Advance and use it in your project. It has a lot of options and is fast.
GBA Graphics also has a very powerful universal map editor, very easy to use, so that you will not have to create your own editor for your projects. It allows you to edit multiple maps (planes), link them, create specimen (sample) maps where you can pick up blocks easily, has multiple undo/redo support, displaying transparent planes, a properties window (set each tile individually), you can do arithmetic operations on tiles, zoom, define a grid, do parallax scrolling between planes, and much more. Look at "Sonic" in the "Example" folder, just open "Niveau 01.pgg" with GBA Graphics, you'll see, all is set-up to create sonic levels very easily and quickly, like you could do for any other 2D-type game. Even graphic conversions are automatized with script.
GBA Graphics also feature object lists (used by the Sonic sample), which are special planes on which you put your objects, you can redefine their properties, move them at a pixel near and so on. And with linking, handling a graphic map + collision map + object list is as easy as a simple map! All operations are done on all linked planes (copy/paste, undo, save, move, etc.), except if you press the CTRL key, to apply only on the active plane.
GBA Graphics also has a powerful graphic conversion engine, which can handle any platform type, from 32 bits RGBA true colors to 4-bit GBA tilemaps! Yes, it can create optimized tilemaps with 16 palettes of 16 colors for the GBA!!! Something very awaited that no free tool was able to do before :-(
It uses templates for file formats, so that you can redefine them for any programming language you want. It also features a scripting system, so that you can customize it like you want. It can also be used as commandline.
This tool is not new, but this new version brings a lot of new things, first for english users, because I rewritten all the old french documentation in english and in .chm format, now structured and with screenshots. For french users that were already using it, it also includes a big list of new functionalities that you can read in the "quoi de neuf.txt" document. Notably, all the graphical core has been rewritten to be faster and support multiple platforms as plugins and BMP/PNG/GIF palettes are now taken in account and written in the same order.
Download:
http://gbagraphics.palib.info/GBA_Graphics.zip (2 MB)
You can watch a video of me creating anything needed for a Mario game with GBA Graphics in less than 10 minutes (use satsuki decoder pack, some others might not read it properly):
http://gbagraphics.palib.info/GBA_Graphics_video.rar
