Ripping Genesis Sprites through YY-CHR

[Gaia]

Well, I was wondering, is there a recommended method of ripping a genesis sprite using YY-CHR?

[Goemar]

I really have no idea why you'd want to. Gens K-mod has layer support, a tile viewer, a sprite disabler (think like Kawaks) and basically everything you could ever dream to have in an emulator when it comes to sprites. I know that doesn't answer your questions but it might help if you hadn't heard of it before.

[Garamonde]

Yeah but with tile ripping you can get every single sprite in the game including unused ones and in a lot of cases it means you won't have to play through the entire game (I think) to get all the sprites of one character.

[Goemar]

True yes but I always find you need pretty good knowledge of the game to work with tiles well (specially for palettes). With cheats it's pretty easy to plow through most games and I find it quicker to do it that way and then go into tiles to grab anything unused. Unless it's an RPG of course or something with a ridiculous amount of animation (like Metal Slug, which just isn't possible on the Genesis anyway), then tiles can be a life-saver of time.

Capturing can easily be seen as redundant for more modern consoles, and difficult with the SNES thanks to current (and more than likely last) emulators' poor options for sprite viewing but with the Genesis it's such a breeze it's definitely worth looking into. I'm not saying capturing is better than tiles, as it really isn't as tiles can just save so much time and produce a sheet vastly more quickly than capturing could ever hope to do in most cases.

But if the game is a platformer or shooter or other short game it's definitely worth checking out the capturing abilities of Gens K-Mod as they are truly exceptional (that Shadow Ape sheet I did for Pinnochio was done incredibly quickly). If however you have your heart set on tiles I always thought YY-CHR was pretty out-dated now, with many other programs being much easier to use (Tile-Molester etc.)

[Garamonde]

Oh yeah I agree with you. Yawackhary said that tile ripping can be very difficult for the Genesis, and some games don't even work with tile programs (they're compressed and what have you), so yes even if time-saving it can be much more of an effort which is why I'd most likely end up doing it the only fashioned way too (speaking of which I have yet to get into Genesis ripping. I really need to...).

Though if it's not too hard to do it with the game he's targeting (which game are you aiming for specifically Gaia? It'd help if you told us of one game you're planning to do), it'd probably be good to give tile ripping a shot. I believe Yawa uses YY-CHR for most of his ripping, so he'd definitely be the person to ask. I actually don't know if there is a better program or not for tiles but I'm sure there's a reason he uses YY-CHR. Anyway hope that helps in any way at all.

[Gaia]

Basically, those kinds of games that are rare to find on a genesis console (RPG/Puzzle) and most likely very hard to obtain. I used to mostly use Gens but I can see it's outdated these days.

[Yawackhary]

Ripping Genesis games isn't as easy as some consoles such as say the NES (and sorry that I wasn't around earlier, only just noticed the thread ). In fact some games require complete knowledge of 68000 assembly/disassembly and compression routines to decompress the data that sadly I don't have.

While saying the genre does help a little, it really does depend on the game whether you get lucky and see all the sprites (rare but slightly more common with Chinese games), some of the sprites (some games), just the playable character (many games) or none at all (compressed, many games). However you might get lucky and find a compressed game that can be decompressed especially if it uses the Nemesis compression. There's a search tool can be found here that does the work for you but you have to unzip the ROM and rename the file to something short for it to work e.g. sonic.bin. Plus it's command line so it needs a tiny bit of knowledge but not too much. I know that there's also Caravan for Shining Force II, NOSE for the EA NHL hockey series, a decompressing tool for Thunder Force III and a couple of others in terms of editors. One of these days, I should really go through as many Mega Drive/Genesis games again to find out which ones are compressed in ROM or not since I forgot.

Oh and in case what tile program I use, I use TileMolester (the version that RaccoonSam did with the extra palettes) since it suppose palettes from Genesis emulator savestates (even though I have to correct the palette slightly using the Gens G/S emulator as a reference afterwards). Even then there's still the assembly of the tiles, some games being a complete nightmare to the point of feeling like giving up.

Also there is a tool similar to vsnes called GSavestate but unlike that tool, you can't remove the sprites. Oh and if you do go for the GensKMod method (for some games it is the easiest/only way), some games won't work and even then some games display a black background both on the tiles on the tile viewer and the background e.g. Adventures of Batman and Robin. Even when I tried hacking that game, it still gives a black background. In case you want to know, many Mega Drive games use black in their sprites so a black background ruins them especially if it uses black on the edge of the sprite.

Also while I don't really use YY-CHR unless it is absoutely needed (e.g. MSX games, some PC Engine games), some versions as in the more later versions don't even recognise the console but selecting 4bpp MSX shows up the sprites if they can be viewed. The reason why I don't use that is because it is better to get a rough palette than it is to have no palette.

[Maxim]

If all fails, i use a modified gens with lua support and a script, that forces the background to pink colour. Get it here: Link

tested with "Adventures of Batman and Robin":

[puggsoy]

If all fails, i use a modified gens with lua support and a script, that forces the background to pink colour. Get it here: Link

tested with "Adventures of Batman and Robin":

This.

This is gold. Thank you.

[Davy Jones]

Even when I tried hacking that game, it still gives a black background.

Once upon a time, I had a similar problem with PSX-VRAM and the portraits from Lunar SSSC. They used black and the background of VRAM was also black, I couldn't do anything about it.

Then I discovered that you can make two screenshots, one with correct colours and one with a wrong palette (no black in the sprites) to get the outlines. I put them on a neutral sheet, recoloured the outlines of the wrong-coloured sprites back to black and laid the correct colour sprites on them.

Problem solved. By the way, all this knowledge about compression routines, modified emulators and work-arounds should be available to public when the new TSR launches and we start overworking the tutorial section. There are so many tricks people don't know, it would be a waste keeping it in the forums.

[Goemar]

My own video guide. If you have any questions just ask.