Issues ripping with MAME

[Mr. L]

I noticed recently that the arcade Double Dragon games have very few of their sprites ripped, so I thought I'd contribute to one of my favorite series. Unfortunately I ran into a very irritating technical problem.



For some reason, there's strange artifacting/bleed on the pixels of every game I run on MAME. It's not very noticeable when you're playing, but when you take a screenshot, this is the result. At first I thought this was just some strange side effect of the screen being resized, so I tried making the game display in its native resolution...



Not only does it persist, it's even worse. Now the discolored pixels are the same size as the game's pixels, causing everything to look muddled and blurry. Needless to say, it's impossible to rip any sprites from a game that looks like this using screenshots. It's technically doable at higher resolutions, since you can separate the artifacted pixels out and clean them up manually, but it adds an immense amount of work to what's already a pretty involved task. Now, there is a workaround to this using the f12 key, which creates perfect unmarred snapshots of the game in its native resolution.





But unfortunately, you can't take f12 snapshots of the tile viewer, which means that I'd have to try and snapshot each frame of animation as it happens in game, which is no easy task, and I'd have to clean up around the sprite, and it would seriously complicate getting some of the damaged, weapon wielding or throwing sprites which only happen while other graphics are overlapping the characters.  And that's not even getting into more advanced games that have transparency effects or stretched sprites that I might want to rip from later.

I tried messing with various MAME settings and asking for help on a MAME forum, and I even tried making a fresh install in a different folder, on a different drive, etc., and none of it solves my bleedover pixel problem. Anyone have any advice?

[shadowman44]

Here's what you do with the tile viewer:
You first downsize the pixels down to 1:1 by pressing -, then hit printscreen.
Then you can paste it into MSpaint or whatever photo manipulation program you use.
Since the tile viewer's tiles default background is black, you may want to switch the palettes of the sprites and recolor them back when you get them cropped out.

[Mr. L]

That doesn't solve the problem. Just like making the game display 1:1, the discolored pixels mix in with the regular ones and make the sprites fuzzy.

[Dolphman]

Maybe check the settings to see if bilinear filters are on and turn them off. Those filters are the worst thing with emulators and source ports because they ruin the pixel art

[Mr. L]

No bilinear filtering appears to be happening at any level. I'm quite baffled at the source of this problem.

[Magma MK-II]

Well this is weird, because here it works fine:



Which build of MAME are you using?

[AFruitaday!]

I actually suggest using cocktail mode, there you can rip the sprites without zooming it more. Open up the tileviewer with cocktail mode and see it for yourself!

[Barack Obama]

- What are your system specs (CPU, graphics card, RAM)?
- Since when do you have these problems?
- Was there a time when your current system was displaying the graphics completely fine?