Mario & Luigi: BIS Ripping Project

[Ton]

Excellent work!

[puggsoy]

Great job man! I should get around to redoing Mario Overworld.

I can perhaps make a small executable or GIMP script for merging the hammers with the character sprites (I hacked something together for it last time), it helps a lot although I do remember some of the frames being off by a few pixels and still requiring some manual adjustment.

[Shade]

That sounds great, actually! If you wouldn't mind putting something like that together, I'd be grateful. Even if it's not 100% accurate, I can easily adjust things further from in-game screenshots when necessary, so that's not much of an issue.

[puggsoy]

OK, this should work. In case you've never installed a GIMP plugin before, place it in "C:\Users\<username>\.gimp-2.8\plug-ins", and then (re)start GIMP.

The way it works is that you should open up the hammer sheet, then go to Filters - BIS Hammer Merge (it'll be way near the bottom). You'll get a popup with 4 parameters. "Character sheet" is the sheet with the corresponding Mario/Luigi sprites to merge with this hammer sheet. Typically this is the image just before it, e.g. if you have Fobjpc0034.png open you should pick Fobjpc0033.png. "Width in frames" is how many frames wide the character sheet is. "Height in frames" is the same for the height.

The last parameter, "Additional Y offset for character sprites", is a bit weird. The script centres the character sprites to the hammer sprites and, while this almost gets it right, the vertical position is usually a bit off from what you actually want. This parameter allows you to tell the script how many more pixels up (negative number) or down (positive number) the character sprites should be placed. I've been testing with Fobjpc0034, Fobjpc0036 and Fobjpc0038, and for these the value for this parameter is best set at 2, 4, and -6 respectively. I don't know if Luigi has any other hammer sheets, but if he does I'd suggest first trying it with 0, and then seeing how far off most of the sprites seem to be. A bit of trial and error, but unfortunately there's no way to detect this automatically.

And yeah, you'll have to adjust some of the frames by hand, like you said you can compare them to in-game screenshots (I found stepping through frames on DeSmuME to be quite useful). This is why I made the script put the hammers and characters on separate layers. If a frame is off, you can cut out the hammer, paste it as its own layer and move it (and then merge back if you want or whatever).

Uh yeah I think that's it! Tell me if anything explodes

[trainboy2019]

I uploaded Dark mechawful, Giant bowser, and bowser castle, working on tower of Yikk right now.

[Ton]

I added a comment to Bowser's Castle for some corrections. When you moved the bottom half of the sheet, it looks like you cut part of the castle off on the left side.

Here are a couple other things I noticed if you're interested:
-I know for a fact that Bowser's Battle and Overworld are severely lacking.
-Luigi's Battle sprites are also pretty light.
-Some of the Bros Attacks (Snack Basket, in particular) have some bits that are chopped off.
-Some enemies (Chuboomba, Crawful, both forms of Midbus) are also obscured by effects or chopped off by the frame.
-Some enemies haven't been ripped at all; Jailgoon (Bob-Omb), Leaf Guy, and Wiggler spring to mind.

I'm super excited you're continuing this game after so long!

[trainboy2019]

Thanks for the notice about the cutoffs, I'll try to do a complete rips of the sheets you mentioned. I decided to work on this after I sat down and played this game again last weekend. Also, the tower of Yikk seems to be missing a sprite. It looks like there should be a sheet called Bobjmon0239, but it's not there.

[Ton]

Do you mean it's not in the game's data?

[trainboy2019]

I've been using the sheets uploaded here while trying to figure out how to extract them from the .dat file in the rom. The sheet isn't uploaded in this project.

Bower's overworld sprites incoming. (Why are there over 100 sheets for him?!)

[puggsoy]

Mind if I claim Luigi Battle? I've been planning to get to it (Shade said he wasn't going to) sometime soonish. I also need to redo Mario Overworld, and probably do Mario Helping Luigi since I said I would :\
I'll mark that you've claimed Bowser Overworld, if there's anything else you want to claim tell me and I can edit the OP.

By the way, not a big deal but would you be OK with trying to stay consistent with our sheets? I don't want to snag your individuality away from you of course, but it might just look nice to have all sheets (or at least new/redone ones) in a similar style. If not for all your sheets then at least for Bowser's ones.
The problem with just slapping the provided rips together is that it, well, just looks a bit ugly. They don't seem particularly organised and they're just sort of all over the place. Also the sprites aren't anti-aliased so you should use an opaque background colour.
All that said, it might be a good idea to get these kind of versions up first, just so that people have access to the sprites at all. But I would encourage them to be replaced with more organised versions in the future.

In any case it's awesome to see someone work on this again, hopefully it should motivate me to do so too!

[trainboy2019]

Mind if I claim Luigi Battle? I've been planning to get to it (Shade said he wasn't going to) sometime soonish. I also need to redo Mario Overworld, and probably do Mario Helping Luigi since I said I would :\
I'll mark that you've claimed Bowser Overworld, if there's anything else you want to claim tell me and I can edit the OP.

By the way, not a big deal but would you be OK with trying to stay consistent with our sheets? I don't want to snag your individuality away from you of course, but it might just look nice to have all sheets (or at least new/redone ones) in a similar style. If not for all your sheets then at least for Bowser's ones.
The problem with just slapping the provided rips together is that it, well, just looks a bit ugly. They don't seem particularly organised and they're just sort of all over the place. Also the sprites aren't anti-aliased so you should use an opaque background colour.
All that said, it might be a good idea to get these kind of versions up first, just so that people have access to the sprites at all. But I would encourage them to be replaced with more organised versions in the future.

In any case it's awesome to see someone work on this again, hopefully it should motivate me to do so too!

For the luigi battle, mario overworld, and mario and luigi, go for it!
What style should I use? Sorry about how unorganized it is, there were just so many sheets. I'll see what I can do to fix that.

[Ton]

I've been using the sheets uploaded here while trying to figure out how to extract them from the .dat file in the rom. The sheet isn't uploaded in this project.

Bower's overworld sprites incoming. (Why are there over 100 sheets for him?!)

Were there repeated frames? There might be a way to auto detect for pixel perfect frames.

[blueYOSHI]

I dont know if this fits in here but I still wanted to ask

I got a problem, I tried ripping Sprites myself with Tinke 0.9.2 and I got a problem, I only find .dat files and I dont know how to open these, anyone knows how?
I also tried ripping them with DeSmuMe but I mostly got some weird mess of pixels or just a blackscreen, rarely I got some Backgrounds but never Sprites like a Toad

Anyone knows a solution?

[puggsoy]

Check out the first post, I've linked to a bunch of stuff that Greiga Master ripped.

For the luigi battle, mario overworld, and mario and luigi, go for it!
What style should I use? Sorry about how unorganized it is, there were just so many sheets. I'll see what I can do to fix that.

Aim for something like my Mario Battle and Shade's Luigi Overworld sheets. Basically just putting them top-down in order, with opaque backgrounds (one for frames and one for empty space), trying to group related stuff together. For instance you can see in Mario Battle that all of the things related to using an item are together, even though they may have been on separate sheets. You can also put multiple things on the same line even if they aren't in the source sheets, for example Mario's jumping frames and some of his hammer frames.

You may find Daxar's Sprite Sheeter useful, although you'll then have to extract the animations into new files for it to use. Personally I just copied over selections and arranged them by hand.

[blueYOSHI]

So, I can just take these and create a Sheet out of it?

I kinda still want to rip some for my own