Ripping Tutorial for PC Engine / TurboGrafx 16 / TurboGrafx CD

[Barack Obama]

The basic knowledge for this tutorial stems from Magma MK-II's ripping tutorial, some private messages and my own experiences.
Original tutorial: https://www.vg-resource.com/thread-23241.html (GUI frontend Let's Mednafen is outdated)
A more text-heavy tutorial by fantasyanime can be found here: https://fantasyanime.com/emuhelp/index

What do I need?
Mednafen - current version: 1.31 unstable / https://mednafen.github.io / Neccessary emulator.
Mednaffe - current version: 0.9.2. / https://github.com/AmatCoder/mednaffe / This GUI frontend will navigate your emulator.
[BIOS] Super CD-ROM System (Japan) (v3.0) is a PCR file and the next thing you need, you can google it for yourself.
Game ROM, typically the one you want to rip from. I chose Princess Minerva, a game which comes with IMG, CCD and SUB files.

What to do with these files?
1. Extract Mednafen.
2. Extract Mednaffe and put everything in the Mednafen directory.
3. Open mednaffe.exe and go to Systems - PC Engine (CD) / TurboGrafx 16 (CD) / SuperGrafx (pce) - Emulation
4. There you can load the CD bios in. Without it, the whole thing won't work.
5. Go to Systems - PC Engine (CD) / TurboGrafx 16 (CD) / SuperGrafx (pce) - Graphics
6. From there, do this:
- System: First rendered scanline: 0, Last rendered scanline: 239 / you can leave the other two boxes above unchecked
- Windowed: Scaling factor for the X / Y Axis should be 1,000000 (just type 1, Mednaffe adds the rest of the 0s)
- Scale/Filter: Interpolation: 0, Special video scaler: none
- Shader: OpenGL shader: none
- Blur: Leave Enable video temporal blur unchecked
7. If you don't want to play with the keyboard, you can go to Systems - PC Engine (CD) / TurboGrafx 16 (CD) / SuperGrafx (pce) - Input and set up the keys for your gamepad.
8. Now you can go to File - Open in the upper task bar and load the CCD file of your game.

Before I get into this, can you show me what the emulator and its GUI frontend look like?

Spoiler

It's really simple.

Okay, and what does the BIOS screen and sprite/tile viewer look like?

Spoiler

Simple again.

How can I rip sprites and backgrounds now?

So you boot-up your game and play it to the point where what you want to rip is (let's say you want to rip some enemies, you play the game until you see the enemy). Now you press "ALT+D" to bring the Memory Viewer, and then press "ALT+2" to bring the tile viewer.

* Left and Right arrows switch between backgrounds and sprites;
* Up and Down arrows scroll through the tiles;
* "," and "." scrolls through palettes.

Additional info: Press ALT+D again to close the sprite/tile viewer, pressing ESC closes the game.

Now that I can acess the sprites and backgrounds, what about capture tools?
Capture tools are up to you, I suggest the following:
Stills: Any tool with hotkey function that lets you mark the custom area which you want to capture (Snagit, etc.)
Animations: ScreenGet, an updated version of AnimGet:
https://spritedatabase.net/download (Tool)
https://spritedatabase.net/downloads/ScreenGetTut.html (Tutorial)
Of course, you can also use it for stills. ScreenGet erases duplicates on its own, btw.

I did it, but all sprites and tiles are resized, what can I do?
Everything within the sprite/tile viewer is resized with pixels being 4-times larger than they originally are (2-times more height and 2-times more width). Therefore choose a graphics program of your choice and reduce the image size by 50% with a filter that doesn't blur the sprites/tiles (for example: pixel filter) or if you can, disable resampling/filters altogether.

Everything has now the correct size, but the tiles and sprites on my sheets are... in pieces?
In this case, activate the grid function within your graphics program and set the grid to 8x8 pixels. This is the smallest grid size used by these games and makes it way easier to assemble the tiles and sprites. If it gets too difficult, use screencaps as reference.

I also noticed that my screencaps are cut off at the bottom, how can I fix this?

Spoiler

Noticable when the height of the background in pixels is not a multiple of 8, but you already fixed this at point 6.

Nice, any other hints I should know about?

Spoiler

Set up your keys for savestates, fast forward and layers, if neccessary.
SaveStates: Also known as quicksaves, since saving everywhere is way more convenient than ingame saving.
Fast-Forwarding: You can skip a custom amount of frames with it, perfect for long unskippable intros and cutscenes.
Layers: Hide sprites and certain background layers to have a cleaner capture screen.

6. From there, do this:
- Windowed: Scaling factor for the X / Y Axis should be 1,000000 (just type 1, Mednaffe adds the rest of the 0s)

This step is not neccessary if you only want to rip from the internal sprite/tile viewer, because this viewer always shows the same resolution no matter how you set up the rest of your emulator.
If you want to rip stuff by using screencaps, stick to the native resolution as described in the quote.

I hope this helps. Maybe I do a tutorial for SNES ripping next, but no promises.