Internal representation

Note this article does not apply to palettes and regular tiles.

One important concept to grasp is the fact that in Retro Graphics Toolkit when you load file it is actually converted to it’s own internal representation which may support more information than the target console. For example you can load far more tiles than the system can store in ram and then assign each tile on the map using a tile out of range of 2047 (sega genesis) or 255 (NES). So why does Retro Graphics Toolkit let you do this? The reason is so that you have the flexibility to get the art the way you want it to be then when done get everything to limitations of the console. For example you mess around with the tilemap save your project then use the remove duplicate tiles function and now everything fits and you just saved yourself lots of time and got the same end result and from there all you need to do is export your data and you are done.

As an extreme example I imported a tileset ripped from a game and stored as a png file. Upon importing the tileset it took 57600 tiles but after generating a palette for the image and dithering it and removing duplicate tiles it now takes only 657 tiles. You would have to be very crazy to want to do that by hand. Don’t waste hours of your time doing something by hand that Retro Graphics Toolkit can do very quickly.