Well, I would hardly call it finished, but I have the bare bones of a mapper made. The really cool thing here is that because I am so new, this looks really fast to me, even though I know my code is absolute crap.
Here in this shot you can see the beginnnings of palette town. It's not finished past the two houses as I am mapping it out by hand (the map maker is not finished quite yet) but other than that you can see my poor asm skills.
This is only the initial drawing engine, which will put the first image on-screen when you enter an area. The rest will be covered by a scrolling routine, which will write later when I have toe collision system worked out. This way, I know it's going to work alright even if it doesn't look good. Here's that screenie:
I intend to finish palette town, and then work on a couple systems to basically allow you to (primitively) walk around the town and not walk through things. The character is not there yet, because I've been focusing on the map. But it is a great achievement (two days of headaches and a discovery that modifying the interrupt registers while they are being used isn't a very good idea) so I dedided to go ahead and post it. The project is now taking shape. Congrats.
-gamefreak
PS: Would it be a bad idea to require about 5000 bytes (give or take a few) for the APP to run? Cause I really need to be able to copy the map and graphics to RAM to keep the basic engines on one page. Plus, this will speed things up and make things smaller in the actual app.