I'm posting this here because this is where Dark Dragon said to post this sort of thing.
I was really serious when I offered to improve the new classic, and this is what I have to show for it. This doesn't fix every little issue, but it is overall better in my opinion. Here's what I did:
-Set up the combos for outlands dungeons and changes screen 83 on the second map to an Outlands dungeon room.
-Made a door set using Outlands doors.
-Added the missing classic combos: non-animated waterfall and slow walk overworld stairs.
-Reimplemented shallow water combos.
-Created overworld style solid damage combos, represented as cacti (thanks to my artistic sister for helping on the custom tile).
-Added default combos for Swim Warp A and Dive Warp A-D.
-Added boss lockboxes to the dungeon combos (you can argue about whether they could look better).
-Added stairs B-D for both types of staircases, as well as A-D for "ascending" stairs of both colors.
-Implemented treasure chests. I had to add a few colors to cset 8 to make them look right; I hope no one minds (a few of cset 8's pointless, redundant colors could be replaced with my additions if need be - did you know that there was not a single bright red on the whole palette?).
What I didn't do but that still needs done:
-The Spinning Tiles that _L_ suggested.
-Block X tiles for Arrows, All, and "Brang".
-Palette tweaking for NES consistency.
http://files.filefront.com//;8203958;;/
I hope what I have put forth is good; feel free to tweak it as you will to maximize the quality. I just want new classic to be as good for questbuilding as possible.
Looks good, but merging this .qst with the default will be tricky as several changes have been made to the template in recent builds.
Could you download the latest build (500 I believe) and add specifically the changes you have made, and then save and post the resulting quest? Alternatively, list the exact numbers of the changed tiles and combos, and I'll see what I can do.
This was done in b500 entirely unless I've gone completely crazy (I think it was the release of b500 that inspired me to actually sit down and do it; I knew this sort of thing would be better done in a few long time blocks instead of many short ones). Me going completely crazy isn't completely implausible I guess. If you're sure that this was started in a build other than 500, I can remake it, but that's not a particularly insubstantial effort so I want to be sure that it's necessary before I do it.
Listing changed combos would be somewhat odd since I used the insert function a lot so the combo numbers of most of the combos changed. I didn't really randomly add things in the middle of sections though. The added areas are the area starting at shallow water and going down in the overworld tiles(180-203), the entire outlands section(356-447), and the bottom of the dungeon floor tiles starting with the boss lockbox(572-603). Since I manually moved the stairs, I did have to manually replace the stairs in room 81 so the three stair warp would still work. I added new tiles at numbers 12250, 12251, 12270, 12271, 13152, 13137-13139, 13157-13159, and the 2x4 block with 15672 as the upper left corner (tall, not fat).
Ah, fantastic, I wasn't sure you used the latest template (though I suppose the smaller file size should have tipped me off.)
Included in the next build.