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For Nintendo games I use the FCEUX emulator. The people working on adding more features for that emulator have been very helpfull and they have added a few features I suggested for making maps easier. If you want to map NES games I would recomend checking out the FCEUX Web Site.

I take screen shots of the game using the "Alt" + "Print Screen" button to capture the emulator screen to the clipboard. From there I past it into Photoshop. I have a file with a selection saved that crops out the game screen from the emulator interface. From there I past it into the map file I am creating. Using layers, I assemble the various screen shots together forming the map.

For some games I will go through taking multiple screen shots of the same area. First with all the enemies, and then again with any hidden items that appear after killing the enemies like in The Legend of Zelda.

I also go thought and edit out the character in most cases. I also try to make sure the enemies are not overlapping, so it can easily be seen how many enemies are in a certain area and what they look like.

Once I finish the map in Photoshop I add the copyright information and sometimes a ledged for the map. Then I save out the map as a .png file. I find that format takes up the least amount of space and there is no loss in image quality using that format. I then use a program called PNGGauntlet to compress the .png file to an even smaller file size to make it load faster on the web.

This process take a varying amount of time depending on the size of the map and the complexity of the area being mapped. The easiest games to map are games like Arkanoid and Solomon's Key where one screen is the entire map for that level and I just piece them all together in one image.

One of the more complex games to map for the Nintendo was Metroid. Even though I had a base to start from using a map editor, it was still a lot of work to go through and color correct many of the areas, and add in items and enemies that the map editor did not include.

Also side scrolling games or levels are harder to map then games that have one screen as one room.

It took about three weeks to Make all the Maps for the The Legend of Zelda where it took severl months to do all the Palace levels for Zelda II The Advanture of Link. The most time consuming one was the Overworld Map for The Legend of Zelda done in Flash. I worked on that on and off for about a year. Arkanoid, and Mario Bros only took me one day. The Gurdian Legend took about a month.