How Do You Extract Sprites From A Rom?

[Lightsier]

I see alot of people have icons and animted gifs they made from various arcade roms. Is there a program that extracts these sprites from roms (I want to extract some CPS2 sprites) or are you guys pretty much playing a game on an emulator, pausing it, then taking a screen capture to get the sprite?

 

I'm just curious.

Edited April 14, 2004 by Lightsier

[Weirdy]

I think nebula does that

[Agozer]

Some CPS games have sprite viewers built-in to the Test Menu.

[Thunder In Paradise]

Actually, emulators such as Kawaks and Nebula do have little utilities built into them to enable sprite removal. This is accomplished by first pausing the game, then opening the "shots factory", then disabling the background layers, as well as the any other foreground layers other then what you want to capture. Then you use "frame advance" to move the game ahead frame by frame, and take screenshots of each frame. Then you use an animation program, I prefer Animation Shop 3, which comes with Paint Shop Pro, and re-assemble all the screenshots in order. Crop, make the background transparent by using "color replacement". Adjust speed and optimization levels, and boom, done.

[Agozer]

Thunder: Yeah, that's the most basic way of ripping sprites....most emulators have this feature.

[Thunder In Paradise]

Course, once you start getting into more advanced sprites like my avatar, which was from Armed Police Batrider and only playable in MAME, then it starts taking alot longer to do them. Also, sprites I've done from Valkyrie Profile for the PSX, as well as a bunch of other MAME sprites, all have to be done by hand, meaning, there is no layer removal or anything to help you, it's just you and the "eraser" tool.

[StriderSkorpion]

There is a MAME port (don't know the URL) that helps with sprite ripping. The port was older, so I don't know what games it supported. That feature could *possibly* be implemented in the current code, but I don't know as I haven't messed with it.

[the mystical fighter]

or if you want game sprites then get them from gsarchives.net

[Thunder In Paradise]

Yes Mystical, I'm also a very active member at that site, and within their forums as well.

[Suzaku]

Personally, I use the "zwei_fuss method", which uses anim-get, animation shop, and a command-line program to edit, resize, crop, and save any number of sprites virtually at the same time, preparing them for an animation.

 

It's very helpful with programs like chankast or for NGP games which have no sprite-extraction utlities, and is extremely useful in that you could rip a 3,000 frame animation just as easily as a 3 frame one.