The VG Resource

Are you ripping per Hex-Editor? If yes, mind giving a short tutorial (maybe with pictures)?

(02-21-2013, 02:09 PM)Davy Jones Wrote: [ -> ]Are you ripping per Hex-Editor? If yes, mind giving a short tutorial (maybe with pictures)?

No, I primarily do ripping with screenshots. I like to try and get the raw tiles from the games if I can, just in case there's effects or something covering up the character in gameplay. With this particular game it was very easy to do so.

do these games not show the files when opened with WinZIP/WinRAR?

There's a few where that's the case, but many of them do not. CoS might have, but I honestly can't remember at the moment.

Quote:It's very simple, but at the same time, slow and tedious as hell. (Ultimecia from TSR used this trick I taught her)

Once you unpack the .jar contents, try looking for files without an extention. (They are usually "bigger" than the other files.)
Open your hex editor and open said file on it. Go to the "search" option and type "PNG" or "BMP", then start the search. If you are lucky, the hex editor will detect the image headers.

Once you get your first result, delete ALL the data that appeared before the image header information, save your changes and open the file (usually dragging it into) using whatever image edition program you have (I use Paint Shop Pro)

If you did it correctly, now you will be able to see the graphics. Copy it, then paste it on your sheet. Go back to your hex editor and resume the search to find the next image data, then repeat the process until you have extracted all the encrypted images.

As I said, this process is slow and incredibly tedious, but it's guaranteed to extract ALL the image data as long ou could find and identify the image headers hidden there.

This is what I've found, but I'm not smart enough to understand it.

I do! And I can tell you that this will only work in a few cases!

Sorry for derailing, I'll keep this short.

First of all, a .jar is nothing but a renamed .zip thus you can unpack it by changing the extension and doing your usual unzipping (with the files) (some people can do it without renaming, yesyes).
Then you've got a bunch of files and more files and if you're lucky some of these files contain the graphics. Now this method basically tells you to check the files if they contain PNG or BMP files (ebmedded within them) (searching for "BMP" will most likely not help you with BMP files as their header says "BM6" if I'm not mistaken (probably other numbers, too)).
PNG files start with "PNG" in ASCII so searching for "PNG" will bring you to the start of a PNG file within the file you're checking (if there are any!!), same with "BM6" for BMPs. By deleting all the data in front of it (or copying everything starting from there), you get a file that starts with the image data you want so your image software can recognize it.
However this only works if they actually use PNG or BMP and the files aren't compressed!! (Aside of PNG's own interner compression, that is)
Many games, however, use different file formats and compression and mean tricks.


Oh my gosh I just read about JNG - PNG-like files that actually contain JPEG data. Eeeeeh.

The Hex-Editor froze every time I tried that, now I saw the problem: I have to search for "Text" and not for Hexa-decimal stuff.

Actually he found a PNG:


What should I delete? Everything before the whole PNG-row or just everything before these three numbers?

I use HxD, never froze, the only issue it has is if you edit the files you have opened with another program.

You'd delete everything that comes in front of "‰PNG" (0x89504E47). That means, that one character in front of PNG (which is a black rectangle in your editor) should be the first in your new file - the new file should start with "89 50 4E 47" in hex.

"49 45 4E 44 AE 42 60 82" in Hex or "IEND®B`‚" in text marks the end of a PNG file (although I'm not too sure about the last four numbers, they may differ, the IEND is always there) but having more data behind that should not matter, as this chunk already tells the program that the PNG ends there and it shouldn't read onward.

it's up. also, this thread should probably be titled rasgar's submissions or something since it's not just DHL sprites now.

also, I feel the need to say this after all this time: your avatar is freaking cool. what's it from?

This is long overdue probably, but I'd like to update a couple of submissions if possible. I missed an animation on Royce's sheets for DHL1 and 2.

New versions here and here.

(02-25-2013, 02:12 PM)Mighty Jetters Wrote: [ -> ]it's up. also, this thread should probably be titled rasgar's submissions or something since it's not just DHL sprites now.

I was thinking the same thing. Is there a way for me to change the thread title.

Quote:also, I feel the need to say this after all this time: your avatar is freaking cool. what's it from?

It's from Folklore, one of my favorite PS3 games, although it's rather unpopular I think.

I changed it. you click and hold the thread title (while browsing the corresponding forum) and then you can edit it.
also I see, it looks kinda interesting!

finally updated the sheets.

Hey, I know I haven't submitted anything for a long time, but I finally started ripping things again. I noticed there's now an "Add sprite" button on the game's page, should I just do it that way from now on?

Also, there's some enemies in game #4 that are also in the earlier games (exact same sprites and everything). How is a situation like that usually handled? Does it suffice to have the sheet filed under the earlier game, or should I submit the same thing again to have another copy in the newest game?

That's the best way to do it, yeah! It'll get your upload on the site a lot faster

If the sprites are exactly the same, save game-specific exceptions, you can make a "master sheet" listing the sprites that are the same across all games, then listing the sprites that are unique to each game. Kind of like this: http://www.spriters-resource.com/nes/mm5/sheet/36586/

As you can see, it's listed under Mega Man 1-10, so you could do that for all the DHL games. So if you wanted to update the sheets for all games to be like that, that'd be fine.