How to rip sprites from Superman: Man of Steel for C64?

[HylianSonic]

I want to rip the sprites from the Commodore 64 game Superman: Man of Steel, but I don't know how.

[Yawackhary]

There are two ways of doing this, the easier way or the harder way:

Option 1: Firstly download CSFEC, this is a fairly new emulator that also comes with a ZX Spectrum and an Amstrad CPC emulator. This is what I use and familiar with it especially on the Spectrum side but have used it for Formula 1 Simulator and WEC Le Mans. Since Superman: The Man of Steel is a PAL game (I believe it's by Tynesoft), you're in luck as it should work. Had it been a NTSC game, it would have been a different story...

Afterwards if you use Windows, you have to do one thing before running the emulator. This is because we're print screening and the default setting makes it all blurry. Right click on the exe and select Properties, then go into Compatibility and select Change high DPI settings. Go to Override high DPI scaling behaviour and tick where it says Application. Then select OK and Apply the settings.

Boot it up, then drag and drop the tape dump of the game onto the emulator window for the game to load. If it doesn't load, try another dump of the game. If it does load and the loading/title screen pops up, then yay! Go to Settings and activate the Virtual Joystick, you may also have to flip joystick ports if the arrow keys and Z button doesn't work.

Once it's loaded (this is a heavy multi-load game) and you're on the first level, go to Machine and Debug, then press W to get the Graphics Viewer. If you do it right, you should see on the top right the palette, some sprites and in the centre some numbers. This is where it gets a bit technical...

The C64 has two modes of displaying graphics, pressing Tab twice changes between them. Press Up and Down or Page Up and Page Down to cycle through, Left and Right to adjust the graphics while the Home and End keys are to cycle through the bitplanes. Bitplanes is what the home computer store the graphics in terms of horizontal size, different to consoles. This also helps with Spectrum, Amstrad and even the Amiga and the Atari ST. From my tests, Superman's graphics are at Bitplane 3 and this is a fairly common set up on the C64 for sprites. To make it easier, Superman and the demons start from $6440.

Then just print screen and use your editor of choice. You would have to recolor the sprites and apart from that, happy ripping. Oh and if you're curious...

Option 2: This is a much harder way and this is an over 20 years method is to download C64 Sprite and CharSet Ripper. You would have to make a savestate (or a snapshot as it is called in home computer terms) from an emulator and load it up. Still useful for NTSC and Commodore 16 games (with a bit of hacking for the latter).