Tile ripping tutorials

[Terry von Feledae]

When people don’t want to / aren’t able to (tile) rip, their typical excuse is either “I lack the tools and don’t know where to get them or don’t even know what tools I need” or “I haven’t got a clue how to rip”.
In order to finally get some (more?) life back into the Sprite Rip Sub forum, I decided to write some tutorials on how to do it.
(Alright, someone else gave me the idea, but… Details.)
Not to mention that ripping sprites from a game can give you a far better understanding of the style and how the sprites in it work, so even those of you who don’t really want to bother helping the site could perhaps give it a try.

Screenshot-ripping is pretty much a no-brainer, so I won’t go too much into it. All you need is AnimGet, a working emulator(preferably one that is able to disable layers) and a basic paint program.
Tile ripping on the other hand can be very complex and is different from console to console, so I’m going to explain it more in-depth.

Game Boy Advance

Tools: Visual Boy Advance

The GBA is one of the easiest consoles to rip from simply because VBA is a great emulator in all ways imaginable. Let’s just say that I want to rip the Rock Armour from Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow(Game chosen at random).

Attachment 12415

In case it wasn’t obvious, the Rock Armour is the big brown thing on the left side.
What I need to do now is to screenshot the sheet together. I like VBA because it makes even that easier than it usually is. It has this really useful function that is activated by pressing Ctrl+N. To explain it, I need to give a small idea of how games work. Much like movies and GIF animations, animations in video games are also made of multiple “pictures” put together from all the components on the screen, the frames. Pressing Ctrl+N will make the game advance exactly one frame. Doing so again will make the game progress to another frame. It goes without saying that this is really useful because instead of having only one shot at every frame, you can work on a single frame as much as you want before moving on to the next.
Some layer disabling, a few screenshots and some C+P later, I have finished a basic sheet.
However! I am one of these people who value their rips to be fully accurate and as complete as possible. A sheet is neither of the two is the tile-ripped part is missing(excluding those cases when the sprite is always the same as it’s tiles, like most main character sprites), so, now we need the Tile Viewer.

Attachment 12416

The Tools menu is the most important thing when ripping from the GBA. I highlighted the Tile Viewer here.

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The tile viewer is the most useful extra tool for tile ripping with the emulator. Of course, looking at it like that might not make it seem that way. I need the Rock Armour tileset, and not a map and some misc stuff that is also discoloured!
However, we have some options on the right. Let’s take a look at them.
Colours - this switches between 4bpp- and 8bpp encoding. This probably doesn’t tell you anything, but you’ll leave this field untouched for the most part anyway, as the GBA rarely uses sprites/background objects with 256 colours. However some title screen graphics and certain background objects in some game do, so if the viewer shows weird gibberish(rare occasition), you can try switching here.

Char Base - This changes the “focus” of the Tile viewer. The first four options show different parts of the background tileset, the last one shows sprites.

Palette - This bar lets you switch palettes. Simply shift it around a bit until you find the palette for what you need.

So after changing “Char Base” and “Palette” to what I need, this is what I get.

Attachment 12418

The Tile viewer shows the tile data of everything that is currently loaded in the game, which usually is everything that is in the room you are in depending on the game. So it’s usually a good idea to head to where what you want to rip is in-game.

So as you can see, from there, it’s all a simple matter of copying and pasting. Instead of simply taking the tileset 1:1 though, you should try putting it into a somewhat more accessible shape. If you have trouble telling some tiles from other ones, you can try pasting it onto a grid of 8x8 pixel squares - 8x8 is the size of each tile.

You probably have noticed that only a single pose of Soma is loaded into the Tile Viewer. That’s because most main characters’ and many bosses’ sheets are simply far too huge to store them in the tiny loadable tileset, so they usually have to be loaded a small part or often even a single pose at a time. If you want to rip those things via the Tile viewer, you’ll simply have to open it once for each frame.

Usually, there is no assembly required. With some games however, no such luck.

Attachment 12419

IKEA tiles? Anyway, you could now start puzzling them together in paint… Or, in some cases, you could use the OAM viewer instead.

(Huge nerd bonus to anyone who can guess what stage I took this screenshot in just by looking at the discoloured enemy fragments…)

Attachment 12420

Now, that’s different! The OAM viewer is a good substitute sometimes when the Tile viewer is too tedious to work with. As a bonus, you don’t even have to find the correct palette. Just use the arrows at the top to switch from one tile group to another. You still have to add some tiles on the outside here and there, but it's still much, much easier at times.
The great weakness of the OAM viewer compared to the Tile viewer, aside from the fact that you need to take more screenshots, is that while the Tile Viewer shows everything loaded into the game, the OAM viewer shows everything on the screen only. For instance, this is all I get for the Rock Armour of above:

Attachment 12421

So yes, the Tile viewer tends to be more useful.

Another tool I want to mention is the Palette viewer. It’s only really useful if you like to put those little palette bars at the bottom of your sheet like I do, but those bars are worth considering since a sprite with one is both easier to recolour and easier to pick colours for custom sprites from. And all you need to do is copy the palette you need(each row is one palette) and make it look a tad neater.

And as a small example, here’s the finished rip of the Rock Armour.

Attachment 12422


Playstation

Tools: ePSXe, PSX-VRAM

NOTE: I will not explain how to run ePSXe. It’s a somewhat complex procedure and would require an entire topic on its own. Just Google for some FAQ or something.
I never said it would be easy, didn’t I?

The PSX is one of the consoles ripped from least, not counting those last- or current gen consoles that aren’t emulated, or only barely in the PS2’s case. Which isn’t surprising with its emulation being fairly “meh” at times and there being few tools out there for it.
The solution? The program Clownman told me about that I’ve praised a lot in my sprite ripping thread(s) lately, PSX-VRAM. I’m surprised that it’s so unknown, considering its abilities…
Anyway, all you need to use it is ePSXe. I think other emulators that can create savestates work too, but I haven’t tested that and ePSXe is basically the best emulator for the console out there anyway so it’s not really worth bothering. Anyway(again), what you need to do now is create a savestate where the sprite you want to rip is. It’s Run -> Save state in case you didn’t know. Now, open the folder “sstates” in the folder of ePSXe. Each savestate is made of two files - One ending in “.000”(Or “.001”, “.002” and so on depending on what slot you saved the state in) and another one ending in “.pic”. The latter one is of no use for us and can be ignored. As for the one with a number at the end, you need to change its extension to “.gz”. And it turns into a G-zip file! Magic? Now, simply extract it. Obviously, you need a program that can extract G-zip archives for this, like WinRar. You will get a file that has the same name as the archive you just extracted, only without any extension. Now, open PSX-VRAM and then simply drag the extension less file into the VRAM-window. If you did everything correctly, you will get something like this:

 click to show

Attachment 12423

Alright, I know that this looks confusing. No buttons? No, PSX-VRAM is controlled entirely via keyboard.
First of all, you need to select a Codec. I won’t go into explaining what it is and how it works, I will just say that different consoles and sometimes different sprites can have different codecs and you will need to select the correct one in order to view them properly. To change it, use the number buttons on the keyboard. Pressing “9” will change the codec to 4bpp, which is the one most sprites on the PSX use. “0” will change it to 8bpp, which is what sprites that use 256 colours are encoded in. The other number buttons also have Codecs assigned to them, but they are largely unimportant.
As soon as you press one of the buttons, two cursors will appear, one large red square cursor and one cross-cursor. The square one is moved using the W, A, S and D keys, and represents your “focus”. Move it onto the jumbled mess to the right of the screenshots, and a decompressed version of said mess will appear at the bottom of the screen. It’s either discoloured or even purely black though. And this is where the second cursor comes into play. That cursor is the one responsible for palettes. How it works? Move the cursor around with the arrow keys of your keyboard - The sixteen(or 256) pixels directly to the right of the cursor will be the palette, each pixel being one palette “slot”. So where are you going to find the needed palettes, with this somewhat odd organisation? Easily. See that bar below the screenshots that appears to be made up entirely of randomly coloured pixels? Yeah, that’s the palettes. Simply keep moving the cursor downward using the arrow keys(By the way, holding Shift while pressing an arrow key will make it move one pixel instead of the usual 16, which is needed to switch rows in the palette-bar), and then search around for the correct palette. The palettes are not always aligned this neatly(In Metal Slug X, for instance, they are basically all over the place), but usually, they are easy to find and use. So, here's a screen of VRAM with the adjustments needed to rip the Ultimate Armour made.

 click to show

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Again, it’s usually simple screenshot/C+P from here. Sometimes you have to put together the sprite from the tiles, but that is unavoidable. Paste it onto a tile-grid if you have trouble telling one tile from another(Note: The PSX is one of the only consoles that use 16x16 tiles. Even the NES uses ones 8x8 in size). But, oh no! Much like VBA’s Tile viewer, PSX-VRAM only shows what was loaded into the game by the time the savestate was made. And once again, developers tend to play tricks by loading only one pose at a time into the game sometimes. So how does one get around this? There is no Ctrl+N on ePSXe that could make it possible for you to make a savestate for every frame. Thankfully, this is a rare occurrence on the PSX due to it having more tile space than the GBA, but if it happens, what could you do?
For starters, you could simply bugger that rip and do something else instead, because ripping those kinds of sprites tend to take a lot of time and patience. If you’re somewhat crazy, like me, you could try anyway. First of all, you need to slow down the emulator. You can do this by setting the FPS Limit in Config -> Video -> Configure to 10 FPS. Now, execute the motion you want to rip in the game. Then, even BEFORE the character starts doing it, start madly mashing the Escape button(or press it once if your keyboard is actually responsive, you lucky guy). Now, you can make a savestate. Saving a state will make the game run again, so as soon as you save it, start madly mashing the Esc button again. If everything goes right, you’ll be able to create another savestate directly after the first. Rinse, repeat. Your Esc button might suffer, but at least you’ll have one state for each frame you need. …Hopefully.
So why am I typing out all this? Because I need someone to help me ripping X’ armours. :P
Seriously, I am not patient enough to rip anything beyond armour less X and the Ultimate Armour, and there are still five other armours that need re-ripping.

By the way, yes, PSX VRAM can display textures too.

 click to show

Attachment 12425

(That reminds me, the Legends section is pretty empty… *hint hint*)

For the little palette bars, simply copy the 16-pixel-palette and enlarge it(I enlarge them by 800%).

Once again, an example of a rip made with the above method(s)(Yes, it's not nearly complete):

Attachment 12426


So, yeah. That's it for now. I'll update this with a tutorial on DS ripping later, maybe. If you think that I am missing something or wrote something incorrectly, have a question, spotted a grammatical error or think that I am a total hack who should just kill himself, feel free to tell me. Because I am fairly certain I made some mistakes. I just hope this is useful for anyone...

[DWN-060 Clownman]

Originally Posted by Terry F.

and another one ending in “.pic”. The latter one is of no use for us and can be ignored.

For the record, this file is used by ePSXe itself, it's the little picture that shows up when you are selecting the savestate slots.

[Barubary]

(Huge nerd bonus to anyone who can guess what stage I took this screenshot in just by looking at the discoloured enemy fragments…)

Area Zero? (at least; the area between the the trailer camp and the hunter camp in Area Zero ?)
=P

Anyway, I might as well start with (part of) the DS tutorial;


DS
There are quite a few ways to tile rip for the DS, and whether or not you are able to use them differs greatly per game. I'll start with the one you should try before trying anything else.
Note: unfortunately, this works for none of the DS MM games.

Method 1: Directly from Tahaxan

Tools: Tahaxan (obviously), and maybe IWE (see below)

This method can be used with quite a few games, and is most likely the easiest of them all.
In this example I will use the Japanese version of Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, and I want to rip the main character; Vaan.

Start Tahaxan and load the game. Now you can browse through the game's file structure.

 click to show

What you're looking for is basically anything that doesn't have a next to it's filename. More specifically, you're looking for any of these: .
In order, those are a picture without palette, a picture with palette, a palette, an archive file, and a tile map (I'll explain later).
Let's first look for any files that could possibly contain Vaan.

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It's an archive, which we can open by double-clicking. A note: not all archives are supported, not even all of them that do have the icon.

 click to show

It seems there's only a picture without palette (from here on referred to as a 'raw picture'), so trying to open it (by double-clicking) will only result in some red text appearing in the bottom-left corner: 'Please select a palette file'.
Luckily, while browsing we noticed that below the folder 'chara' was the folder 'charaplt', which incidentally contains the palettes in similar archives.

 click to show

Select the palette (by double-clicking), and you'll see the selected raw picture using the selected palette in most cases. However, we've got no such luck, because the image size wasn't stored in our raw image, nor was it an easy-to guess size (like 256x256). This means you'll have to grab (or open) a calculator and do some guessing yourself.

 click to show

We know the sprites from Vaan aren't very large, so we will guess the width of the image as 32 pixels. 47872/32 = 1496, so enter '32x1496'.

 click to show

Press OK (or press Enter) to see the result of our guess.

 click to show

It seems the width was too large. One sprite of Vaan is spread across two columns, so we will halve the width (and double the height) by changing the values in the top-left corner. 32/2 = 16, and 1496*2 = 2992.

 click to show

That's better. Now we want to save this image, so we can edit it in our favourite program (use Paint if you have to). Just right-click and select the only option: Save image as...

Sometimes there are multiple palettes stored in one palette file. If that is the case, you can use the dropdown menu on the left to switch between palettes.

 click to show

What to do with the other types of files?
: just double-click to open it. This picture has a built-in palette, so this is probably the easiest to rip. These aren't that common, though.
: This is a Tile map. As the name suggests, it will map tiles, but also stores which palette to use for each tile. For example; a Tileset for some area is stored as a raw picture with it's appropriate palette. By opening those you won't see the area, but rather the tiles that the area is composed of, and usually different tiles have different palettes. If you select the Tile Map before selecting the raw picture and palette, that Tile Map will be applied to the Tileset. If you chose the correct Tile Map, you will see the assembled area.

 click to show

Example (Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja 2)
Without Tile Map:

With Tile Map:

IWE

Now for the promised part about IWE, which you probably know nothing about since the only place I've showed it up to now is tSR. It's basically a program that lets you edit the width (and thereby also the height) of an image, and is actually quite useful when tile ripping (If I may say so myself). After reading the part below and doing some ripping yourself, you'll find out soon enough why it is. ;]
This is the 'tutorial' I wrote for the first version:

 click to show

This started as a small Java program with the command line as interface, to make ripping from Final Fantasy XII:RW easier for me.
Then came Fret, and suggested me to expand it and add a GUI, because he liked it. The finished product (for now at least) can be found here: link. You can paste an image in it, and edit the width in a linear or tiled way. (examples below)
It should work with both Java 1.5 and 1.6. If you still have an older version, you should consider updating it.

- Sort-of-tutorial -

requirements: a pc with Java 1.6 (use the second version if you only have 1.5).

how to open:
- double-click the .jar-file, or open it with the Java Platform if it doesn't by default
- or make a .bat-file with the following content:

java -jar ImageWidthEditor.jar

Instead of how to use it, I'll just say what it can do, and you should be able to decide for yourself how you want to use it.



- Clear Canvas: clears the canvas if there is an image on it (shortcut Ctrl+D)
- Copy image: copies the image on the canvas, if any (shortcut Ctrl+C)
- Paste image: pastes an image on the canvas, if there is an image on the clipboard (shortcut: Ctrl+V)
- Set shortcuts: set the shortcuts for the menu-items not in this menu (the File-menu)[*] (shortcut: F1)
- Exit: should be obvious (shortcut: Ctrl+Q)


These items reduce the width of the image (and increase the height). An example why you want to use these options:
You have this: . Just load the image, and choose 'width/2' to get this: .
Default shortcuts:
width/2 - '3'
width/4 - '2'
width/8 - '1'


These items are, quite obviously, the opposite of the 'Reduce'-menu; they increase the width (and decrease the height). Another example:
You have this: . Just choose 'width*2' to get this:
Default shortcuts:
width*2 - '4'
width*4 - '5'
width*8 - '6'


Pixels are small, so you'll want to zoom in sometimes.
Default shortcuts:
increase zoom - '+'
decrease zoom - '-'
Note: you can zoom up to 3200% by using the shortcuts, but 800% should be more than enough.


Not all sprites are stored linearly, some are stored tiled. The mode is set to Linear by default, and the examples above are also made using the Linear mode.
Some tiled examples:
-> (width/2)
or -> (width*2)
Default shortcut:
switch (flip) mode - 'f'


This is just a status bar, but you'd probably like to know which mode you're using. L is Linear, T is Tiled.
It should be obvious what the zoom stands for.


Have fun with it. =)


[*] you can't actually edit the shortcuts using that option, it'll only tell you how to do it; by editing the file IWEkeys.ini the program created after starting up for the first time. You'll have to reset IWE for the changes to take effect.

In the meantime, there have been some small additions: 'customization';
The ratio to enlarge/reduce the width with can be any integer (given that the image has the correct dimensions), and the size of the tiles can be specified manually as well.

[mega rock.exe]

Originally Posted by VBA Tile Viewer

If you want to rip those things via the Tile viewer, you’ll simply have to open it once for each frame.

Not necessarily, true. I don't know if you knew already, but that's what the Refresh button is for. Just get the next frame in the game and refresh it and it's different.

[turpinator]

Could you give us a link to this PSX-VRAM you speak of? I just did a thorough google on it and found bupkus. I assume i goes under a different psuedonym?

[Barubary]

Not really, it's called 'PSX VRAM Viewer'. However, because of the quite common terms in it's name, it's quite hard to find. You can find it here.

[turpinator]

Originally Posted by Barubary

Not really, it's called 'PSX VRAM Viewer'. However, because of the quite common terms in it's name, it's quite hard to find. You can find it here.

Yes, that was the problem I was having. :P And thank you for the link.

[brianuuu]

How to load image with your ImageWidthEditor_java5?
Or it just suppout some format? (I use .PNG file)

[Barubary]

Originally Posted by brianuuu

How to load image with your ImageWidthEditor_java5?
Or it just suppout some format? (I use .PNG file)

Copy it from your image editor of choice, and paste it into the program.

[AZUMIKNIGHT]

Are there anymore PSX emulators that are easier to use??
preferrably like Kawaks. but it doesn't support PSX roms..
I think.