I see so many shrines with nifty dungeon maps, town maps etc. How do I make one like that?
By utilizing your emulator’s screenshot, my boy!
If you’re using an emulator, you turn off the sprite layer and screeny every little piece you can. Then you open up an image editing program and clip them all together. A long and drawn out process, and impossible if you’re not running an emulatable system.
That doesn’t work on NES games (dunno about other 8-bit systems or if it applies to only 8-bit systems), where even the best emulator (coughFCEUXDcough) doesn’t allow you to disable the sprite “layer” (for the NES, it’d probably just mean tripping the PPU so as to turn sprite display off via the emulator itself or by simply adding a special case for the sprite disable option…).
ANYWAY, when it comes to the NES, what you have to do is strategically take your screenshots (wait for NPCs to move out of the way and take one before and after, move the PC around, etc.) and then copy/paste the parts so that you get a sprite-empty image. Repeat for the entire area. Alternatively, you could probalby just hack the rom and extract the map data (including hte palette data) and copy/paste each tile individually, or write a program to do all of this for you. Hah! Finally, an idea for a program! 
Uh, hope this helps. 
ok thanks for the input, can you recommend a good image editing software as well?
Hard to believe so many people did that for the shrines, must have taken a long time to get done.
I always just used MSPaint cuz the high-end programs (paintshop pro, photoshop, etc) pissed me off. I would just create the maps in Paint and then copy/paste it into the high-end program and save it from that (make sure you don’t save it in Paint as it will screw up the image).
Yep, I did exactly the same thing, RC. 
Except my “high-end program” was MS Photo Editor which comes with Office.
Great minds, huh? 