The PPU viewers are a collection of separate tools that allow you to view the current state of various parts of the PPU’s memory - tiles, tilemaps, sprites and palettes.
All viewers have some settings in common:
You can zoom in and out the viewer by using the zoom in and zoom out shortcuts in the view menu, or by holding the Ctrl
key and using the mouse wheel.
Additionally, you can pan/scroll the viewer by clicking and dragging, or by using the mouse wheel (use the Shift
key to scroll horizontally.)
The tilemap viewer displays the contents of each background layer, based on the current PPU mode. For Game Boy games, this displays either the background or window’s contents.
Click on a tile in the tilemap to display information about the selected tile on the right. The information displayed changes depending on whether the current ROM is a SNES or Game Boy game.
There are also a number of display options:
The tile viewer can display the content of any type of memory (including video ram itself) as if it were tile data, in one of the various tile formats supported (2 BPP, 4 BPP, 8 BPP, etc.).
For the SNES, there are a number of preset buttons that can be used to quickly view the tiles used by the matching background layer or sprites.
Options:
There are also a number of display options:
The sprite viewer displays the contents of OAM RAM. The left portion of the screen displays the sprites as they are on the screen, while the right half is a list of all sprites in OAM. Sprites displayed in gray in the list are off-screen.
Click on a sprite in either side of the viewer to highlight the same sprite on the opposite half.
Hide off-screen sprites: When enabled, sprites that are off-screen will not be shown in the list.
The Palette Viewer displays basic information about the current state of CG RAM (palette RAM).
Click on a color in the viewer to see details about it.
For Game Boy games, the selected palettes for the background and the two sprite palettes.
For Game Boy Color games, the 8 background and 8 sprite palettes are shown.