Paraemon's Comprehensive Ripping Project Thread [Expansion Station]

[Paraemon]

Paraemon's Comprehensive Ripping Art Project

This was a project I created for the sole purpose of reinvigorating sprite sheets, or adding new ones with missing content, originally for games within the 16-bit Sonic franchise and Chaotix; this has since expanded to other works, if in a minimal capacity to begin with.

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Information

What does this project entail, and what content am I looking at?
Utilising the VDP and various in-game mechanics, debug mode and glitches, I will set about getting everything within the games to have a full functioning sheet within logical standards. Overtly long character animations will be ignored* and given instructions on how to create*. There will be no garbled sprites unless they can be reconstructed into something whole - palettes from these may be taken if suitable.

*May not apply to sheets eventually linked further down in this post, depending on the sheet.

Will other members be able to participate?
From time to time I will request clarification or ask for help with certain objects I cannot get with my own two hands, but the objects must come from the games themselves, not from the internet. Maybe further into the future, I will allow others to help or work on the project, with a strict but simple set of rules.

What about the sheets already on TSR?
They're useful for people who are able to accurately reconstruct the sprites, or for people who want to splice. My content will remain as faithful as possible to the unbroken sprites unless otherwise noted. This is also to preserve color correctness.

What if real life gets in the way and I can no longer continue?
Then I will open the project to others with the set of rules.

How long do I expect it to take?
Well, Rome wasn't built in a day, and certain parts of the project can, and will, take days before they are completed. Plus, there are and will be points where I have to scarper for a brief period because of real life.

What information resources do I look at?
Sonic Retro and the Cutting Room Floor.

What games am I looking at for Sprites?
Whatever takes my fancy, but the main list is as below:
Sonic the Hedgehog (Sega Genesis)
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 & Prototypes (Sega Genesis)
Sonic the Hedgehog CD & Prototypes
Sonic the Hedgehog 3/Sonic & Knuckles & Prototypes
Sonic 3D Blast (Sega Genesis)
(Knuckles') Chaotix
Streets of Rage
Cutie Suzuki no Ringside Angel (Japanese)


If you have any questions, please, do ask.

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The Sprites!

The sheets linked below will not be the published versions as seen on TSR, but rips or updated editions to align with my perfectionist nature.

Sonic the Hedgehog

Icon Pending.

Information Pending.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Knuckles in Sonic 2 and the Prototypes

Icon Pending.

Information Pending.

Sonic the Hedgehog CD

Icon pending.

Information Pending.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3, Sonic & Knuckles, S3K, Get Blue Spheres and the Prototypes

Project Icon Pending.

Character Sheets (Heroes, Villains, Mooks and Crafts, Animals)

   

Further icons forthcoming.

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Campaign Stage Sheets (Assets & Objects)

     
       

Bonus Stage & Special Stage Sheets (Assets & Objects)
Icons pending.

Get Blue Spheres.
Glowing Spheres (0408).
Glowing Spheres (Final).
Gumball Machine.
Slot Machine.

Competition Sheets (Assets, Objects & Characters)
Icons pending.

Azure Lake.
Balloon Park.
Chrome Gadget.
Desert Palace.
Endless Mine.
Character Sprites.
Menu & Results.
Objects.

Everything Else!
Icons pending.

Angel Island.
Blue Spheres (Game).
Credits & Endings.
Data Select.
Death Egg.
Emeralds.
Fonts.
General Objects (Rings, Monitors, Shields, Spikes, Starposts, Warp Rings, Bubbles, Countdown, Goal signs, Capsules, etc).
Score Tallies.
Sound Test.
Title Cards.
Title Screens.
Tornado.

Further Information Pending.

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Proof of Concept (July 30, 2017)

Gumball Machine (Everything?)

Currently, the only thing ripped that I can share for sure is a near-to-absolutely complete sheet for the Gumball Machine Bonus Stage; it is not the final sheet, I expect to further edit it to change some objects and have a better credits box. You can view this in the attachment. I have added in full versions of the grey and "S" spheres (I cannot locate a proper glow colour without it being false on various websites) as seen in the machine's foreground for a simple "Completion +" idea; this "Completion +" is a very case-by-case idea and will not be present on every sheet.

[Ton]

Interested to see how this turns out.

[Dolphman]

Hate to break it to you, but the brighter palette is completely incorrect. The white renders them useless because it's the same as MS Paint's.
See this? It's from Taxman's port of Sonic CD. This is the correct palette. CD 96 and Sonic & Knuckles Collection are both like this.

Whatever setting your emulators are using. You have the brightness up way too high.
My rips were done using GENS' and with its rendering set to RAW, which matches the palettes of the ports.

Spoiler

EDIT: I corrected the palette for you.

EDIT 2: Reroganized it a bit.

EDIT 3: Now it's done.

[Paraemon]

I'll be fair, I did expect some early resistance.

Hate to break it to you, but the brighter palette is completely incorrect. The white renders them useless because it's the same as MS Paint's.

Which is a problem.... how? If the background used is not white, then surely it should not be an issue? The biggest problem I've encountered is the black being the same as MS Paint's, making parts of the Death Egg mechs hard to accurately rip without the planet backdrop.

See this? It's from Taxman's port of Sonic CD. This is the correct palette.

Except the game in question isn't Sonic CD; I'm not interested in working with sprites from that game, so the evidence provided won't shore up for the purposes of this project. Yes, I could make a little rip from the original CD and compare to the evidence, but since I'm working with S3K, then surely a sample of the sprites altered accordingly for the PC would be more logical to test? I am aware that Taxman's work on S3K is a proof of concept video, and the sprites are not/may not be readily available, so maybe provide an example from the Sonic & Knuckles Collection?

While the subject of the PC port is brought up...

Whatever setting your emulators are using. You have the brightness up way too high.
My rips were done using GENS' and with its rendering set to RAW, which matches the palettes of the ports.

The only setting I have activated in GENS is the sound muted, I don't touch the graphic affectation settings for fear of screwing things up in the emulator when trying to rip; I've already twice encountered a problem in sudden JPEG quality cropping up in GENS for no discernible reason. But I think there may be miscommunication - I am not ripping the sprites to align with the ports. As I said earlier on in the questions, I am trying to achieve rips of quality like what Mister Man had done for the Get Blue Spheres sheet; the rips I have of the special stages thus far appear to match the palettes on his sheet.

Right now, the best consideration I have for the suggestion you're giving is a palette comparison between the palette I'm working with, and your 'RAW palette' in some corner of the sheets. Ripping the sprites is the harder work, but getting the colours is child's play once that harder part is out of the way - it's easier to identify their location/frames. That way the people can choose which palette they want to use when editing the sprites. Fair, no? "Completion + +", so to speak.

Also, I will admit that I am curious; the only reason I did not include the letter-lacking blue ball as seen in the background as a individual sprite for "Completion +" was because I could not locate an accompanying darker shade that would fit with it. Are you sure that the black shade is part of the sphere?

[Dolphman]

Oh really? You can mark it as an edit if you want. Also, speaking of palettes, I can recolour the sheets for you to match the others.
And don't you worry about the Death Egg Mech. It's already been taken care of in my complete Robotnik sheet. [LINK]

Though as awesome as the job Mister Man did with the special stage is. The palettes are still off due to using KMOD.
Which has the brightness up too high by default. AusharaMoon said he'll take care of the palettes in the Sonic clean up thread.

[Paraemon]

I've spoken with Dolphman via private message in regard to the previous post he made, so I'm not ignoring him.

Onto business:

I've ripped most to all of the Data Select and Sound Test from Sonic 3 and Sonic 3/& Knuckles - the beta Flying Battery icon itself is from Sonic 3 Complete; I do not have the know-how to data dive to find it myself, so the fastest way I could make a logical inclusion of it was to go out of my way to rip it from the ROM hack - sure, I could've gone to Sonic Retro or TCRF for the icon, but the colours would've been off.

[Note: so I just found a code that would've had the icon appear in a normal game of S3K if I had bothered to pay attention. Go me.  ]



The sheet is still WIP, as can be seen by the incomplete borders - I'm aiming to reorganise it over the next couple of days. The palettes included are for Data Select only, as I have not yet got around to compiling the RAW palette as per Dolphman's argument. The actual- and false-colour icons for the Sonic 2 stages are included since they appear in the Sound Test - this is for "Completion +".

I do have an in-progress Glowing Spheres sheet (this is serious hard work and requires a lot of energy), which is split into two sections:

• The sprites, walls and background "pillars", the last of these items rests on 100 128x128 frames which can fit on the sheet just fine - I have 92 "pillars" currently extracted - RAW palette pending.
  
• The background shifting bricks. These come to a stupid 800 frames. Take one frame (where the bricks look like bricks diagonally), and compare it to one 400 frames later (they'll be the same colour) - they're pointing in different directions. Obviously, this will be in a .zip/.rar archive, with each tile being 384x384 to accommodate a full view at the background structure. Before you ask why I shouldn't just make it up on a sheet with a palette - each frame is different than the one before it (the most ridiculous thing I could've said at 1AM) - obviously, but the colour changes are incredibly frequent, and the frames are only the same as the one 800 prior to or after it. It's easier just to compile them as frames.
  
• Regarding the S-ball that supposedly resides in the Glowing Spheres' debug - I cannot find it, and have tried multiple times, cycling through what can be seen/placed. If I cannot locate it, I will not include it.
  
  

[Ton]

This is looking good!

[Paraemon]

Thanks, Ton!



Now for one of my major pet peeves from the Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Sonic & Knuckles archives on TSR: the Emerald palettes. The colours as seen above are from different palette sources - the left-most lilac Emerald, the orange, lemon and pink shines and the Master Emerald need to be rechecked, as I don't believe they fit in with RAW or my previous non-RAW palette posts, but all the others are non-RAW palettes (RAW palette pending). I'll get back to them.

Super Emeralds
We all know that the top nine Super Emeralds palettes are accurate to their appearance in the Hidden Palace Zone. However, from what I've noticed, the Blue Emerald is susceptible to being changed in ROM hacks to accommodate characters like Amy. I'll return to this point. Right now, I want to focus on the Red Emerald.

So, what are the dark purple and red ones doing below the powerless Emerald and the glow/shine? These are alternate palettes to the Red Emerald. If the Emeralds have previously been directly ripped during the Robotnik scene at HPZ, then it would be easy to gloss over these two palettes. The dark purple one has been an interest of mine for years, since it was such a unforeseen shift in the fact that I had clearly acquired the Red Super Emerald in the Special Stage. Surely I can't have been the only one to have seen it? So I check the TSR archive and it's not there. Sad face.

I don't know the reason, but it's moot, I've ripped it now. Best I can tell, it requires Sonic (maybe Tails, not properly tested) to win the Red Emerald and view this palette (best done first, I think). It should appear again when you acquire the Blue Emerald later, and the Orange if part of the Emerald is in frame. As for the alternate red palette next to the dark purple one, this is something I've uncovered since I started ripping, and seems to be reactive to Knuckles. If the dark purple palette does not show up, and the original palette does not show up, this one will.

Below those are palettes unseen unless you make Knuckles fight himself in HPZ and move on to the Robotnik scene. But Observer, that's impossible, unless you cheat...ohhh. Yes, these two fall away from the purposes of the project, but let's take something into consideration: we can, through the two-tier level select cheat performed in Angel Island Zone and then in Mushroom Hill Zone, allow Knuckles to visit the Death Egg Zone, the Doomsday Zone, the Lava Reef Boss and Sonic's Sky Sanctuary Zone, and Sonic/Tails to visit the Echidna's Sky Sanctuary. Yet Knuckles is still unable to fight himself with this cheat activated. So what gives? We already know from sticking him in Sonic's SSZ, that you will have the player character palette for Knuckles and the regular cutscene palette of Rad Red, side by side.

So why can we not have them fight in HPZ? That darn pesky screen lock. Sticking Knuckles into HPZ with the two-tier cheat active, and it plays out like it would without the cheat being present anyway. So, after taking note from watching a playthrough of Sonic 3 & Amy wherein the Blue Emerald became Pink, I decided it would be fair to see what happened when Knuckles took on his cutscene cousin, whom I dub "Cuticles". This led to seeing that, as the Red Emerald changed to the secondary palette as described above, the Blue Emerald took on the Red's main palette, leaving the two lightest shades of blue left, similar to how the lightest red shade appears on the dark purple gem. Of course, I anticipated that from having seen the video already, but I didn't anticipate the shift that befell the Orange Emerald. I have no idea what that colour is. Puke, probably.

Moving on, the middle row of three Emeralds. The Lilac and Lime Emeralds are the 0408-prototype Green/Mint Emerald; the lime-coloured gem reflects the colour of the Altar behind it, and the lilac colour only appears as the lime colour is replaced throughout HPZ if visiting the Bonus Stage before fighting Cuticles. Fun fact; the White Emerald is replaced with the Green/Mint palette. The broken Orange palette? Seems to be in effect in the 0517-prototype when the Echidna is defeated in Super/Hyper form.

I'm not going to lie, it's stupid hard to get all the Super Emeralds in the 0408 and 0517 prototypes. I can just about manage with the original Special Stages, but depositing all the Chaos Emeralds to HPZ (0517) is an exercise in frustration. Because it's a lengthy process and will require save-states deleted to get anywhere, expect me to take time to resolve the palette issue I highlighted at the start.

Now, the weird powerless Emerald and the variant glows. The two left-most ones are from the 0517-prototype, when Robotnik's floaty pod is hit, the Emerald colours are effected to reflect a strike against the mad scientist's machine. The other three glows/shines come from the 0408-prototype, which appear regardless of Sonic, Tails or Super Sonic; they appear over the lavender and white, light blue and green gems, respective in order as seen on the image.

Super Sonic? This brings me onto the final 10 Super Emerald palettes. In the earliest prototypes available, turning Super Sonic or being Super Sonic (or the Super Flickies in 0517) in the presence of the Blue Emerald yields a glowing Super Emerald that matches the glowing animation of everyone's favourite Seiyan-hog. This covers the first three of the ten. The other seven, you guessed it, Hyper Sonic's palette. But why? Because Super Sonic's palette is broken in the 0517-prototype and he flashes the Hyper palette. So going into the Emerald area in 0517 gives the most energetic Emerald in the entire area, surpassing the Master Emerald's fine glow.

And the Master Emerald brings me on to the palette of the Master Emerald as displayed. This seems to be limited to the 0408-prototype, as the final version of Chaos' prison doesn't have that shade of purple, at least. This is the only frame I have for it at the moment, but I shall investigate further since I only uncovered it tonight. So now...

Chaos Emeralds
Another reason for my interest in ripping anything and everything from the Sonic 3 games was the removal of SupaChao's Hidden Palace Emerald animation sheet. Granted, I know the reason now and agree that it was a bit ridiculous that every little frame was incorporated, but nevertheless, the alternate palette (top circle) for the Emeralds, which largely seems to be indicative of the palettes of the incoming Super Emeralds, was removed with no compensation of them being included on another Emerald sheet. This palette is easily missed, as are the Emerald palettes (bottom circle) seen when you've collected zero to six of them in Sonic 3 (standalone!) and get the "Try Again" screen. But Observer, the bottom circle of Emeralds are just a glitched palette! There's video evidence to the contrary, and you can play the game without winning the Emeralds to see for yourself - why they appear this way, I know not, but real they are. If you want a glitched palette of the Chaos Emeralds, I have intentionally ripped the colours when screwing about with debug in HPZ, but the version of the Emeralds is that from the results screen - I am holding onto these on the main Emeralds WIP sheet until I find a more suitable home for them.

Now, the Special Stage Chaos Emeralds. Why is the Red one there? It's actually a semi-different palette to the Red Emerald seen in S&K/S3K - the darker shades are different, while the lighter red shades remain the same. It appears in Sonic 3 and the prototypes - this palette does extend to the Super Emerald variant as well. The Turquoise Emerald? It's in Sonic 3 and the prototypes, and fills the spot of the Light Blue Emerald we see in the seventh Special Stage of S&K/S3K ; like its displayed Red cousin, it also has a Super Emerald variant that is in the prototypes.

I trust this was enlightening.

[Paraemon]

It's finally done, a full sheet.



These are all the menu objects (excluding those of the Title Screens and Competition Mode) present within the data of Sonic 3, Sonic & Knuckles and Sonic 3 & Knuckles, with the palettes from KMOD and the palette from G7 Raw, so people can choose the colour they prefer to work with.

Between the previous version and the new one, I found that the Sky Chase and Wing Fortress icons did have false colour, the selection box in Sonic 3's Data Select was smaller than the one in S3K, and reading up on Sonic 3 at TCRF allowed me to find the Sonic 2 2-player menu within Sonic 3.

[Ton]

Feel free to submit this as a correction to the one on site if you think it's complete!

[Paraemon]

Done and done. 

So I've started with working on the Badniks of Angel Island Zone, and currently have the easier units completed, with more accurately defined parts so people know where to place the dust for Rhinobot. Since the Bloominator's firing animation varies based on your y-axis position relative to the unit, it would be pointless to incorporate them all since each frame would get larger and wider, so I just included the spike projectiles while they're still visibly connected to Bloominator.

Having had a proper look at how Monkey Dude and Caterkiller, Jr. animate, I will instead break them up with notes of construction and include the appropriate sprite segments to reflect those notes.

Palette-wise, I discovered (through Ice Cap Zone) that the Badnik palettes change when you place them in the middle of a Boss fight or a Knuckles cutscene. Obviously, in the five levels that involve water, the palettes will change. Unfortunately for Rhinobot, it was intended as open-air opponent, so no dust was programmed into its underwater palette, or the other four that belong to it, for that matter. Rhinobot has six palettes: Standard, Underwater, Flame Tank, Bomber Blimp, Flame Mobile and Knuckles (in respective order as shown below).

From what I've seen, the others have the following:
Bloominator (3): Standard, Underwater, Flame Tank (Knuckles results in garbled graphics firing off "TA TA").
Monkey Dude (3): Standard, Underwater, Flame Tank (is prone to departing a la Sonic CD style by climbing out of frame).
Caterkiller, Jr. (3): Standard, Underwater, Flame Tank.




And you also get to see how I space things apart.

[Ton]

This is WAY more comprehensive than I anticipated. Good work! I can start replacing sheets if you're ready. I'm not sure which ones are good to go, and which I should hold off on yet.

[Paraemon]

This is WAY more comprehensive than I anticipated. Good work! I can start replacing sheets if you're ready. I'm not sure which ones are good to go, and which I should hold off on yet.

Thanks man!

No rush on replacing things, I'm still very low on the sheet side of the things (2 of unknown). But I do have a new one ready for the site, I'll put it over in my submission thread as soon as I have an icon.

Competition Menus & Results (the latter of these seems to be missing altogether).

[Dolphman]

I think to avoid replacing my Badnik sheets, we both have parts and assembled sheets. That sound alright to you guys?

[Paraemon]

I think to avoid replacing my Badnik sheets, we both have parts and assembled sheets. That sound alright to you guys?

[Disregard this post, I made it when I had just awoken and stupid as stuff].