#sprite ripping

Hey! I'm pretty flattered you thought to ask me!

So, I'm gonna go through several games, because it highly depends on the game and what you see. That way you have a lot of examples to work with.

Let's start with Death Note: Successor to L as that is the game I'm most know for ripping the sprites from. It is also a bit unstraight forward, which helps some things in explaining.

Upon opening the .nds file in Tinke, this is what we see.

Locate the "data" folder, click the +.

See this data.bin? Despite its icon, we do not want to unpack it.

Instead, we want to Open as > compress

You'll get a popup window called "Select Offset". Don't do anything; just click "Accept".

After a second of waiting, suddenly we have this huge list of new .bins! So where do we find the images?

Scroll until you find the LAST [IPAL] .bin. Everything under it will be the game's sprites.

So, everything under "data_15108.bin [IPAL]" in this case. So...where are the images?

Under it is data_15109.bin. And under that, data_15110.bin. Open as > compress them both.

Based on icon, we can see we have a palette file and a tile file. First, we have to open the palette file as a palette.

Now, let's see what happens if we open the tile file now... (as a tile, of course)

Well...that doesn't look right. For reference, this is the sprite in question:

So, why does it look like that?

What if we manually adjusted the width? You can hold down the up or down arrow to see it change in real time.

But setting it to 128.... (half)

Looks about the right size, just...cut off. We'd have to adjust the height, too.

Or, we can try opening it as a map instead and see if that helps. So let's try opening this file as map instead.

Ah! Did all the work for us! But...where's the other half of the sprite? And why are the colors weird?

Let's Open as > compress the .bin below...

...Well, there's the other half. So, you'll have to stitch them together. Ok, what about the colors?

This is where the palette comes in. Tinke will use the colors of the last palette you viewed. Thankfully, we know this is Light's palette since the palette file precedes all his sprites. But why is it showing up wonky?

See these bold colors up top? This is our issue. We need only one of these bold colors that is clearly not supposed to be a color in Light's sprite. Why? Because that will be the color of the sprite's background (which we can edit out later.)

See this start byte button? Keep clicking up, you will see the squares slowly move backwards (idk how to describe it, just hold down the up button and see for yourself). Do it until only the last bold color remains. Cyan, here.

Now, let's go reopen the image as map.

Perfect! You can even click that "Transparency" button to turn the bold color transparent.

Now, all you have to do is click "Export"

Here's the output:

Of course, the same will have to be done with the sprite below it, and then you'll have to stitch them together in any editing software or art software (MS paint, firealpaca are both free) and there you go! the sprite :)

Now, not all games are like this. So let's look at another.

Let's do Pokemon Black 2 (this is the JP version but as far as I know, both games have the same file paths)

Already, this looks WAY different. No Data folder. Just an "a" folder, with a million sub folders. How are we ever gonna find what we want?

Well, there's 2 answers. One is Google. I googled "Pokemon Black 2 sprite files locations" and got this answer:

So a > 0 > 0 > 4...

But what if Google doesn't have an answer?

Well...Sorry to say, at that point, it's a game of trial and error. You're going to have check everything yourself (that's what I had to do with the Death Note game).

But back to Pokemon. So, I open as > compress....

A little different here, too. But If I had to guess, 4_19.RLCN is our palette, and 4_20.bin (after we open as compress) will be our image.

Right I am. But opening the image as map, it still looks weird. I'll mess with the width - that usually works.

Just a few clicks of the down arrow and we got Bulbasaur.

However, this palette doesn't look like Bulbasaur at all. There's no green or anything...maybe the actual palette it at the bottom there?

So it is! You can tell just by looking at the colors that this is meant to be for Bulbasaur. The greens, blues, and reds for the mouth. Now, the question is how to get the right palette on it...

Unlike Light's palette from earlier, this one is much smaller, so we can tell the palette size is actually 16/16, not 256/1

Just switch it over.

I did 40 for the offset again, as this seems to be a regular number used for palette offsets.

And wouldn't you know it!!

Hi!! Firstly, thank you for the kind words :D

Secondly, back when I did rip the second DN game's sprites, I did try to also rip L the Spiraling Trap, however I was unsuccessful.

The reason for which is because, unlike Death Note: Successor to L, L - the ProLogue to Death Note: Spiraling Trap is encrypted :<

I use Tinke to view DS game files, and the second DN game's file was unencrypted. All I had to do was open the image files as tile in Tinke, mess with the offset and width settings, and then import the correct color palette from the palette files. Tinke can automatically detect which files are images, palettes, text, etc.

The problem with L's game - and a number of other DS games - is that all of these files are encrypted as .bin files, which are generic container files. They're not unique to the DS in any way. Because they are generic container files, figuring out how to open a specific game's .bin files is a biiiig game of trial and error. I'm sure if you knew hexcoding you may have a leg up on me (as I do not know hexcoding, just enough to glitch out Pokemon Yellow and use a gameshark). But as it stands, I have no clue how to break into those .bin files... I have to assume this is why nobody has been able to rip the sprites.

Now, there ARE other ways to do this. If you download a rom to the L game and play it in DeSmuMe, you can rip the sprites by playing the game and following this tutorial here! I haven't done this yet because 1) it has it's own tricks to it and is still a bit of a trial and error situation (read the whole page), and 2) it requires you to actually play the game so the sprites actually appear on the screen. You need to get the sprite you want to show up before you can actually rip it. This means that sprites that, say, only appear during a final scene or something requires you to play the whole game. And I simply do not have the time for that. Maybe one day.

Warning: very long post, probably a rant. Read at your own risk.

I know I’ve been posting a lot of Islands of Wakfu stuff lately - it’s because one day I had the brilliant (?) idea to copy the game off my XBox360 because I wanted a closer look at certain characters. I had seen some in high quality in an episode of Inside Ankama, but I wanted more. Copying the game was the easy bit.

Extracting the contents of the game was a lot trickier, and led me down a rabbit-hole of emulation and modding, but I got there in the end! I found the scenery, lots of artworks, all the pre-rendered videos, and more! But I couldn’t get the characters.

There was one image of Nora in with the scenery sprites, probably as a size reference, and all the Qilby holograms, but I quickly narrowed down the characters as being the files with the .apm extension. Them having descriptive filenames helped a lot - Npc_mina.apm gives away the contents. So I looked for a way to open them, and what luck! GIMP can open APM files, no problem!

There was a problem. The files were registering as 1 pixel by 1 pixel, with a ridiculously negative ratio.

And when I told GIMP to open them anyway, it gave me a horribly non-specific error message and failed. The problem couldn’t be that they were the wrong type of APM - I had checked and rechecked the file header, and it matched every time with what an APM should have.

But I knew it had to be possible to extract the sprites - I’d seen some somewhere on the internet, but so long ago I couldn’t find it again. So I went back to searching. Here’s the image in question. I believe I found it on Reddit, but reverse image searching doesn’t find anything old enough to be the source.

I found the websites of several of the developers, one of which had a good screenshot of one of the characters I was looking for. Alright, so now I only need three more characters. Two, minimum.

The same developer had created the tool that turned the original SWFs into the APMs currently in the game. I also learned from this website that the APB files were sprite sheets, but as I couldn’t easily find information on this specific type of APB, I left them to one side.

More specific searches on Google led me to one other person publicly taking apart Islands of Wakfu, but they were just looking for the music. Not something of much interest to me, since the soundtrack is available on Bandcamp, although extracting the voice lines does hold some appeal in terms of trying to understand them...

But I was getting distracted! I kept searching, trying to find whoever had extracted those sprites before, and coming up empty-handed at every turn. I even asked for help on a sprite-ripping forum, but no-one answered me. And then I wandered back into my old files.

I’m a file hoarder. And I’d been collecting files relating to Islands of Wakfu since before it came out. Artworks, trailers, papertoys... and a video I’d completely forgotten about: a recording of a flash animation from the Islands of Wakfu website.

This flash animation had all the sprites I’d seen ripped in the past, plus more. They were even animated! This had to be the source of those sprites, which meant... that no-one had publicly tried to rip sprites from Islands of Wakfu before me.

Yep, I’m really bad at this.  Is anyone out there good at navigating TiledGGD?

I was able to find a build of MAME 128 with a sprite ripper! I threw it in a zip with the original 128 build, mame.ini, and an easier to read help file

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bHmpjBd3M74imZagawwOJG8LQ2q5qy6k/view?usp=sharing

Remember while in the gfx viewer, G toggles the border on/off and R rotates the sprites (rotation can be done in any current build btw)

Thanks to hitchhikr, you can find his original post below

Princess Debut Sprites

Hey yo, I didn’t know we had a fandom. Also this game has been out for how many years? And we still don’t have sprites? Well, wabam, that’s where I come in.