Star Ocean 2 rips + general PSX techniques?

[finale00]

Sprite ripping looked fun so I got a copy of psx-vram and loaded up SO2 on epsxe and fiddled around with it for an hour or so.

Managed to get things working, but it is quite tedious to work with save states, especially if I want to put together a spritesheet or something and I don't have direct control over a character. Even getting different poses was challenging.



Maybe there is some way to hack the game to change the sprite of whoever I can control, but that sounds even more challenging and probably not the direction I want to go.

I've found that the size of the sprite loaded up at that particular instance is dumped just like that, rather than the original sprite, which just makes things difficult.

What are some ways to deal with sprites that you no control over?
Is there like some "debug" thing where I can just go through a bunch of sprites on the disk (sounds too optimistic)? Save-state ripping doesn't seem like a very efficient way of doing things.

For this game specifically, since it's a tri-ace game, files use their SLZ compression and tools already exist to decompress it. Whether there is a tool to load the files is another issue.

[Davy Jones]

Ask IceManual, he successfully ripped two characters from this game.

[Dazz]

Have you tried decompressing the files and viewing them in TiledGGD?

[finale00]

Not yet. I was planning to dump all of the SLZ's and give that a shot since SLZ decompressors are already available, but couldn't figure out how to read the file system. Will see if someone at xentax can figure it out.