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+--- Thread: Does anyone know how to best extract the graphics from the GBA Sims/Urbz games? (/thread-40904.html)
Does anyone know how to best extract the graphics from the GBA Sims/Urbz games? - Gourlish - 07-27-2022
I used to really enjoy the Game Boy Advance versions of The Sims Bustin' Out and Urbz: Sims In The City when I was a kid and have been trying to rip sprites and other graphics from them for the past few days. Something I find, though, would be that the GBA graphics reader software I have tried out is unable to find many standalone graphics in either, which makes me suspect that they used some sort of proprietary graphics compression technology. I believe a lot of the backgrounds are also stored as lots of small tiles which likely also makes it more difficult to decode individual objects. I can rip the graphics far more easily by using software such as VisualBoyAdvance, but ripping a room in this manner requires me to disable certain graphics layers, then invisibly walk around the room, taking lots of different screenshots until every portion of the room is captured, and then stitching those screenshots together in software such as Paint or Photoshop. This is quite a tedious task and will take a very long time for large rooms (such as outdoor areas) in the game, hence why the rooms I have so far ripped graphics from have been limited to areas such as the hospital interior and the public restrooms, all of which are small areas in the game which were not previously featured on the Spriters Resource.
I believe there may be some graphics and/or rooms which are in the code but not featured in the final product for both games. The Sims: Bustin Out GBA version I believe had an unfinished darts minigame in its code, and the minigame is featured on the N-Gage version. I asked on Reddit to see if anyone could share a screenshot of the minigame in the N-Gage version since I couldn't find any screenshots of it elsewhere, and somebody was kind enough to do so, but it would still be interesting to find out if any of its graphics are in the code for the GBA version. I've had a look at the game using various GBA graphics detection software but have had no luck finding many graphics in the game at all using them - most of the time they just return garbled pixels. The same goes for the GBA version of Urbz. I know that the DS version of Urbz, which is the same game with some additional features, has the Splicer Island area and it would be interesting to find out if any of the graphics for that area made their way into the code for the more limited GBA version, even though they cannot be accessed when playing the game?
In terms of ripping the rooms right up to the far external edges (which cannot always be accessed by your character on foot), is there a setting in VisualBoyAdvance that allows me to do this, potentially by disabling collision detection?