Nessie: The Nametable Editor
Developer Tools
Only for Mac
$1.99
Mac
Nessie: The Nametable Editor is a screen editor for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Where a tile editor gives you the pieces, Nessie is where you put them together.
A background on a NES is a nametable: 32 by 30 cells, one byte each, pointing into a table of tiles. Colour works differently from anything modern. A separate attribute table holds just
64 bytes, and each one covers a 32 by 32 pixel square split into four quadrants - two bits per quadrant, choosing one of four palettes. That constraint is the whole character of NES
artwork, and it is the thing that is hardest to picture in your head. Nessie: The Nametable Editor shows it to you directly.
FEATURES:
• Full 32 by 30 nametable editor with click-to-place and drag-to-draw
• Attribute editor using the hardware layout: one byte per 32 by 32 pixels, four quadrants
• Attribute grid overlay at 2x2 or 4x4, and an optional display of palette indexes
• Four background palettes, switched with Command-0 to Command-3
• Palette import and export as JSON or raw binary
• Import CHR tilesets
• Load and save nametables on their own
• Import, export and clear the attribute table
• Projects saved as a single document holding tiles, nametable, palettes and attributes
• Undo and redo for drawing, one step per stroke, leaving attributes and palettes untouched
• Recent projects and unsaved-changes prompts
JUST PAINT WITH TILES:
Import a CHR file and its tiles become your brush. Click to place, drag to draw a run of them. The screen you are building is the screen the console will draw.
ATTRIBUTES MADE EASY:
Overlay a 2x2 or 4x4 grid to see exactly where the attribute boundaries fall, and turn on palette indexes to read which palette each square has been given. Colour a region, and it is
immediately obvious whether your artwork lines up with the grid or fights it — the difference between a background that looks deliberate and one that looks broken.
HANDLE MULTIPLE PALETTES:
Switch between the four palettes with Command-0 to Command-3, built from the real NES colour set. Import and export them as JSON or raw binary so the same colours follow your project into your other tools.
KEEP TRACK OF THE SCREEN:
A Nessie project is a single document holding the nametable, the tiles, the palettes and the attributes together, so a screen stays intact instead of scattering into four loose files.
When you need those files for your assembler, every part can still be exported on its own - nametable, attribute table and palettes, each in the format the hardware expects.
MADE FOR RETRO DEVELOPMENT ON MAC:
Undo covers a whole stroke, so one press takes back a line of twenty tiles - and it touches only the nametable, never your attributes or palettes. Recent projects, unsaved-changes
prompts and standard Mac shortcuts are all where they should be.
Nessie: The Nametable Editor was written by a developer (me) when I set out to develop games for the NES, to solve the part of the job that no general graphics program understands. If you are making a game, a demo, or a title screen for real hardware, this is the tool for the screen itself.
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The developer, Jonatan Yde, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
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Information
- Seller
- Jonatan Yde
- Size
- 2.5 MB
- Category
- Developer Tools
- Compatibility
Requires macOS 12.6 or later.
- Mac
Requires macOS 12.6 or later.
- Mac
- Languages
- English
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- Copyright
- © 2026 Jonatan Yde
