[Tutorial] Ripping with Tinke (NDS)

[Avegaille]

I think it's time that I wrote this tutorial for those who are interested in using this program. I'll put a couple of games that work so far with Tinke as examples for this tutorial.

What you need:

- Tinke - rev136
- NET Framework ver 3.5 (you won't be able to use Tinke without this)
- Your choice of picture editing software (Paint, Photoshop, etc.)
- The ROM of the NDS game you want to rip (don't ask me for ROMs, k? )

Official site (where the code is so you can compile it yourself): http://code.google.com/p/tinke/

Tutorials in here:

Sprite Ripping (let's use 999 as an example):

- Once you open up Tinke, you will get an Open box, and this is where you choose your ROM. After that, you'll see something like this:



*I suggest deselecting Windowed at this point as to avoid a lot of windows on your screen once you start ripping. But for this tutorial, I will use the Windowed function.

- As of the moment, this program works with only the sprites/mugshots for 999, so let's focus on that. Go to char and you will see a long list. Just choose one of them and click View. You will see something like this:



There are two ways for this. You can either choose to Print Screen this and Paste into your picture editing software or click Save.

(NOTE: Clicking Save for 999 will result you with a black background if you use .bmp . Be sure to change the type of file to .png to allow file transparency.)

It looks easy, right? You can browse through the game that Tinke is compatible with and you'll find a lot of images (depending on what you see).

Here's another game with a much complicated step. Pokemon Platinum. For this example, we're going to mess with the Battle Interface.

- Go to battle -> graphic. You will see some .narc files, right? Select the first one and click Unpack. You should have something like this:



See those icons after the file names. File1 and File2 are both Map files, while File3 is a Tile file, and File4 is a Palette file.

- For this to work, we need a Palette file first. So, you can select File4.RLCN and click View. You should see something like this:



(if you deselected Windowed, this should be by the side of the main window. Something like this.)

- You can choose to close the palette window if you want. After that, we go to File3.RGCN and click View. You will get something like this.



Looks weird, doesn't it? You can close this window if you wish, but if you deselected Windowed, you can ignore this step. We'll go to the last step, which is the Map. In this case, there are two maps, so I'll just go with the first one.

- Select File1.RCSN and click View. You will see something like this.



Oh, but wait, it looks weird. That's because the width is 512. We need to change that to 256. Once you do, you'll see the real thing. File2.RCSN is the separated thing (of the buttons or something). You can also click on View for that and you should see something like this.



You can Double-click the image to see the full resolution and you can either Print Screen or press Save. Either method works.

The order of this method is always Palette -> Tile -> Map. Some games don't show which is which (like Inazuma Eleven) so you have to experiment with these 3 functions through Open As.

Now, let's go to Texture ripping. As of the moment, I have only tested this with Inazuma Eleven. We'll use Inazuma Eleven 3: The Orge for this one.

Texture Ripping:

NOTE: I suggest using the Windowed feature when ripping Textures.

- Open the ROM and go to data_iz -> model -> char. You should see a lot of .pkb files. Unpack pbf.pkb and you'll get this huge list. For now, let's go with File0.pac_ and press Unpack. You'll see something like this.



You will see that single file.

- Now, click View and you should get this window. It'll look like this:



Um, yeah, you can play around with this if you want with your mouse, but it'll look weird. You see that Show Textures button? That one is what we need to press... and then you'll see this:



Oh look it's Endou's face. XD You can choose to either use Save Texture or Print Screen and Paste to your image editing program.

Sound Ripping:

Well, this is delayed tutorial... anyway, time to put up the sound ripping (or previewing) feature of Tinke. We'll use the dub version of Inazuma Eleven 2 Firestorm, because I can. As of this time, I can only say that .SAD and .AXD files are supported by the program... unless there are other types of sound files out there...

- Open up Tinke and go to data_iz -> sound -> en. You should see lots of .SAD files (no, they're not sad, mind you). Lucky for us, Tinke converts this with ease as if we're playing it from a media player. It should look like this:



- Click View and you should get a window with a play and stop button. You can listen to the sound/music from there. Note that if you don't stop the player before previewing the next file with View, the first file you open will continue to play in the background until it is over.



- Click Export to Save As .wav (Wave file). From here, you can look for your own .wav to .mp3 converter. And you're basically done.

NOTE: To export/convert multiple .SAD or .AXD files, first select the folder where they belong, Press R and choose the folder to put them into. It'll convert it into .WAV files.

NOTES:
- When opening Tinke for the first time, it'll be in Spanish. You can change it back to English via Languages but you will have to close the program after that before it'll take effect.

- Keep experimenting if you are able to unpack some of files of a ROM. You might just find things others haven't found.

- Hotkeys for your convenience (thanks to pleonex for telling me the new additions as of rev 135) :
- P -> Palette
- T -> Tile
- M -> Map
- D -> Unpack file
- X -> Expand node
- C -> Collaps node
- Spacebar -> View button
- R -> Export multiple "supported" sound files

- You're pretty much out of luck if Tinke can't even unpack some of the files. A lot of games are compressed and such. But if you wish to have a specific game be supported by Tinke, you can try contacting the programmer (pleonex) yourself through the link I put out.