Auto-generated map for Metal Gear 1

Thanks! I suppose that would be possible, but a little more information would be needed. My script doesn't look at enemies at all, so you could change the floors, but it wouldn't affect the placement of enemies. I've also not looked at how walls are detected; it's possible that they just follow the tiles that are used, but possibly that would also need to be found.

And finally, there are some special things that are bound to the room id. For example, which rooms are dark without the flashlight. That shouldn't be a problem, but it's something to take into account when doing this.

Every room has several arrays of data linked to it; most of them are shared by many rooms and every room just picks one.

• The palette; which palette a room has in encoded from 0x8b40 in page 4,5,6 (0xab40 in the rom). It has 1 nybble per screen, so there is a maximum of 16 palettes. But 0xa, 0xb and 0xf are not used.
• The tile set. Some tiles are the same for all rooms (lift and electric floor panels, boxes), the rest is per room. I made a list of all 8 of them, with a note about what they are used for, in charsets.txt.
• The pattern set. The rooms are stored as a list of 4x4 tile patterns. Which patterns are available is stored in a place pointed by 0x6000+2*room (0x1a000 in the rom). Those patterns do not appear to be shared between rooms.
• Which patterns are used for each tile block in the room. This is only an 8x6 array. It's also not shared between rooms, obviously.
• Exits to other rooms (N, S, W, E)
• "Doors" (anything which is marked in yellow on the images)
• Objects in that room (only for rooms above 0x7a and below 0xdb; outside that range objects are impossible).
• Presumably enemies; I haven't tried to find that list.

I think that's it; all the details are in mkmap, which generates all the images. If you're interested in my thoughts, you can read mg-asm-analysis.txt. They're my notes while I was working on it. I didn't write them for anyone else to understand, but you may find them interesting, so I put them online.

Nice work!

If my notes are right, in the English version:
- Enemies/actors are set in Bank0:55F0
- Enemies/actors index is in Bank5:9560
- Enemy/actors room data structure:
db number of enemies
db idEnemy
dw coordinates
...

Eg:

Bank5:907E ActorsRoom001:  db 3
Bank5:907F                 db ID_GUARD_MED
Bank5:9080                 dw 40B0h
Bank5:9082                 db ID_GUARD_SLOW
Bank5:9083                 dw 5050h
Bank5:9085                 db ID_GUARD_MED
Bank5:9086                 dw 0C018h

In the git repository I linked in the original post is a script (mgrandom) which randomizes the item locations. It makes sure all the items can be found, but it is possible to do it wrong (for example, you must not pick up the silencer until you have killed the guys that are supposed to drop it, because once you have it they will no longer be there, so you would be unable to get the item that they drop).

It's annoying that you cannot see which card you pick up. Because of this, I normally cheat and rewind OpenMSX if I accidentally pick up card 7 or 8. Most of the time, it wouldn't have been a problem, because Mr Arnold and Coward Duck would just drop ammo or a ration (which are the majority of the objects).

Randomizing the destruction sequence would of course be possible, but I don't think it adds that much to it. While playing random games, I found that I always needed to go everywhere anyway to make sure I'm not missing important objects.

I also started to make a randomizer for the Maze of Galious, but that is much less interesting. It just means you have to explore the entire castle before entering world 1. And that while doing that, you'll have almost no health. So it's certainly more challenging, but not so much a search for objects as it is in Metal Gear. Perhaps for MoG the more interesting randomization wouldn't be the objects, but the locations of the world doors...

Or in MoG, randmize everything except the first Great Key and/or halo.