Legend Of Mana: Assembled Bosses/Monsters Sprites

[rufaswan]

Recently, tombmonkey asked an interesting question - upscaling sprites to HD.

As mentioned by post #20, rotation produce jagged lines. It will look pretty bad if we upscale the assembled sprite to HD.

But if we upscale it before the assembling, those jagged lines would be less obvious as we'll have more pixels to work with.

As I am aware, upscaling is about repeating pixels. So I update my script to implement "SCALE". This is Jajara with SCALE=4



The file is "bon_bs00_img/0002.png". You can compare the quality if you upscale it 400%.

For the fun of it, this is Jajara in 4K (SCALE=20)
https://i.imgur.com/o4wfIx7.png

However, I'm not going to rerip everything this time. If you want the upscaled sprites, then you'll have to rip them yourself with the latest source code on my GitHub repo
https://github.com/rufaswan/Web2D_Games/...na_img.php

Edit line 5 on "psxtools/mana_ana_img.php" from

Code:

define("SCALE", 1);

to

Code:

define("SCALE", 5);

Replace 5 with any value you want.

NOTE : SCALE is about duplicating pixels, all fractions (1.5 , 2.25 , 3.667 ...) are invalid.

Then run this two commands

Code:

php.exe  psxtools/mana_ana_img.php  bon_bs00.img
php.exe  psxtools/clut2bmp.php  bon_bs00_img/*.rgba

The result is a bunch of BMP image. You can convert them to PNG as images, to DDS (DirectDraw Surface) to use on your game, or any other file format format you want. It's up to you.

All my scripts are written with minimalistic command-line version php.exe . No extensions required. So it should be able to run on all OS without any problem. But do let me know when you do.

Cheers,
- Rufas

[rufaswan]

After discovered everything is hidden within assembly code on DS vania, I try hacking SOTN Saturn instead.

... and SOTN Saturn files are compressed. The worst part is Saturn emulation is completely new to me. I have no idea how to find stuff.

So I end up trying another Saturn game - Princess Crown. The game files are not compressed or encrypted, so that's a good start.

To my surprise, Saturn (or at least this game) doesn't use an x,y drawing point, but 4 x,y pair coordinates to form a rectangle (quad rendering). Depending the x,y ordering, the result will be different:

NOTE : 1243 is the default sprite


So, instead of a bitflag for vertical/horizontal flipping, and a byte for rotation value, everything needs to be auto-detect from these 4 pair of x,y coordinates.

The worst part is the palettes. All palettes are located on 0.bin , and there are no data on *.pak (sprite data) to link it back. The only suspect it *.prg (program code), so it is DS vania all over again!

Oh crap!

This makes me appreciate Square games a bit more. All their files are self contained. Even enemies with palette swap has their palettes located on the same file. They are not hardcoded or put all over the place.

Going to try another game. Bye.
- Rufas

[Ton]

You're doing an amazing job. I can't believe how dedicated to this you are!