Bio Force Ape Developer's Journal

[Kitsune Sniper]

I REALLY recommend using some sort of compression for the tilemaps if possible. All those "0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0" rows could easily be compressed into three bytes if you play your cards right. Something like (Control byte / Tile byte / Number of times byte should be repeated). If the routine that reads the tile order sees the control byte, then it reads the next byte (the tile byte) and the next one says how many times it should be repeated.

I've seen Konami do this on several of the games I've hacked, and they've managed to compress an entire screen's tilemap in a very small space. The space you save can be used to, say, make more levels or such... Those fourteen consecutive 0s could be compressed to three bytes. You may think it doesn't add up... but it does.