Best SNES emulator for sprite ripping?

[Random Talking Bush]

What I don't like is  that all colours are slightly off, even the vSNES palettes differ from the bsnes+ palettes, with the latter one displaying the colours slightly brighter.
I guess this is how it goes with every emulator, just being slightly off colour in comparison to each other.

Here's a build I made for myself back when I was working on my Pocky & Rocky re-rips, this sets the colors back to their raw values (multiples of 8) instead. Should fix your issues with it.

https://mega.nz/file/W1oFyaSZ#UclkXPCVQK...Eh1dKfp4qo

[Barack Obama]

Tried Pocky & Rocky, made a ZSNES quicksave, opened in vSNES, compared screenshot of the palette with your Pocky & Rocky sprite sheet and you know what?

The colours are absolutely accurate.

So, bsnes+ is the one which is inaccurate, which means that I have no reason to switch from ZSNES/vSNES to bsnes+ since vSNES had correct colours all along.
RTB, thank you for the build with the raw colours, pretty sure it will come in handy for future SNES rippers who want to use a modern SNES emulator.

It's still sad that the version which is most interesting for rippers and nobody has ever heard about before has to be handed out randomly in a forum post.
Oh well, I guess this is what this topic is for.

[Dark_Ansem]

urgh I can't believe I'll have to redo what I did until now!

Just exactly how off are the colours?

[Barack Obama]

If you have the bsnes+ palettes, you can recolour your rips into vSNES palettes, either within your graphics program or Recolor 1.6 by Previous:
https://mega.nz/file/8VxlUDRB#oxLrNq7N98...jgLYp6wr4c
With this tool you just mark two identical things (ideally the palette bars on your sheet) and press the rainbow button to exchange colours between the two. The original sheet isn't affected, instead you save the changes to a new sheet where you can grab the newly recoloured sprites/tiles from.
Btw, the tool doesn't require installation or anything.

The colours in the regular bsnes+ are brighter in contrast to the actual raw palette and it is noticable. It also depends if you went to Settings-Configuration-Video and checked Simulate NTSC-TV gamma ramp or tampered with any other of the other colour adjustment settings in that tab.

Edit:
I also want to say that RTB's link only includes the modified .EXE which still needs the rest of bsnes+. Just download bsnes+, unpack it, delete the two .EXE files you're finding there (bsnes, bsnes-accuracy) and copy RTB's bsnes-rawpalettes into the folder.

[Yawackhary]

Regarding the palettes, they can be off in terms of values and they can even change if you mess about with the color depth in an image editor. It can be a value higher or lower in tolerance or white being 255,255,255 or 248,248,248 but can also be wildly different. Know Genesis emulators with different palettes, an issue with the NES due to no right palette with everything being personal preference and even Game Boy emulators, whoever thought having just greyscale can vary so much.

It's might be the colour conversion as mentioned in BizHawk:

Colors can be converted from the snes 555 format to PC standard 888 in several ways

Meaning that ZSNES/SNES9X, bsnes-plus, bsnes itself along with its successor Ares, Mesen-S and BizHawk all have their ways of showing the palettes and in theory any one of those can be right.

Using the Pocky & Rocky Pocky/Sayo-chan example:


(Ares is missing a color due to no palette viewer, the colorbleed and interframe blending options had to be switched off.) As you can see the SNES9X/ZSNES palette matches RTB's rip but they are all different. The default setting on BizHawk and bsnes-plus/bsnes v115/Mesen-S are VERY close to each other with just two colours that are different but at least with BizHawk you can change to the SNES9X palette that matches the rip.

Mesen-S and Ares are mentioned here as a comparison. Mesen-S has plenty of sprite ripping tools but sadly unlike Mesen, it got abandoned at an early stage while Ares is a multiplatform emulator and already showing signs of potential in terms of accuracy (32X and N64 being highlights of recent work) but not sprite ripper friendly.

[Barack Obama]

Just want to throw this in, maybe because people here experienced the same problem with some games:

vSNES with its SceneViewer, MemViewer, PalViewer

Spoiler

bsnes+ rawpalettes by Random Talking Bush with its game window, Tile Viewer, Sprite Viewer

Spoiler

This is Dual Orb II (SNES) and depending on the viewer software you're using it either shows the correct enemy or party palette, but never both.
In this case, the party palette in bsnes+ is completely missing and the enemy palette in vSNES is also not inside the palette viewer.
So if anyone encounters such a thing, just switch to another viewing tool.

@DarkAnsem:
As you can see, the colour order of the palette bars is the same for both emulators. If you have made a really big rip with the regular bsnes+ and its wrong colours, you can still save your work by recolouring it.

[MarioFanGamer]

urgh I can't believe I'll have to redo what I did until now!

Just exactly how off are the colours?

The easiest explanation is that BSNES+ and Mesen-S divide the colour by 31 and them multiply them by 255, essentially treating the colours as fixed point values instead of as the RGB colours divided by 8. You can also say that after getting the individual colour bits and multiply them by 8, they also copy the three topmost bits into the now lowest three bits like in this formula:

Code:

ABCde -> ABCde000 -> ABCdeABC

The idea is that you can easily convert the graphics like I do: I use an unmodified Mesen-S to rip backgrounds (because keeping track of the tilemaps is a bit of a challenge) and then convert the colours into multiples of 8. Someone suggested the idea to use GIMP's posterisation but I use a simple python script to convert the image (a different one that the one of the linked thread but the point still stands).

[Dark_Ansem]

@barack

Thanks, not that big of a rip but enough that I'll have to redo it. Differences are minimal but they ARE there.

At least I hadn't started my new project, Star Ocean SNES. In fact, if anyone would like to tag along, I'd be happy.