I see so many shrines with nifty dungeon maps, town maps etc. How do I make one like that?
By utilizing your emulatorâs screenshot, my boy!
If youâre 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 youâre not running an emulatable system.
That doesnât 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) doesnât allow you to disable the sprite âlayerâ (for the NES, itâd 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 optionâŚ).
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 donât save it in Paint as it will screw up the image).
Yep, I did exactly the same thing, RC. 
Except my âhigh-end programâ was MS Photo Editor which comes with Office.
Great minds, huh? 