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Image Extraction!

Termite - Dec 17, 2003

		Termite		Dec 17, 2003
			I knew you guys were still out here. Took me a little bit to track you down again. I'm interested in decyphering some sprite and tile images from certain games (MKR, Lunars and Grandias). I found a few files on the MKR disk that I think have this sort of info in it, but I have no experience decyphering image files -- and don't know what to look for. Can anyone help me with some resources that might help me extract these images? Thanks for any help!

		TakaIsSilly		Dec 17, 2003
			Hoe Termite, got your mail. Sega Saturn Screen format, as it seems to be the name, is a fixed image format, that you can find in the ENDING directory of the MKR CD - on a hexdadecimal file viewer they'll start with something of the likes of SEGA SATURN SCREEN. I've yet to find other games using this file format, however. I have that decoder on a backup in home, so I'll try and upload it somewhere this weekend. Due to the massively different ways the sprites are stored, i've created some very cumbersome programs I named TakTools(that you can find on the Saturn Dev Tools page), that allowed you to navigate aroung a file with variable width setting and some pretty rash tile decoding/pallete support. Never the less, I'm pretty sure there are better tools to be used nowadays. Saturn sprite data is nothing mutch. Most of them are plain RAW 16x16 8-bit linear data, with the biggest problem being finding that character's pallete, since it can be from generated on the fly or stored in another file.

		Termite		Dec 17, 2003
			Thanks TakaIsSilly! I checked out the Saturn Dev page for you tools, but the link there is broken. I'll anxiously await the weekend and hope you can upload them. If you want someplace to upload the files, I can give one to you! I can take files from there and archive them on my main webspace as well if you like. Are the programs open source (I hope)? I'd like to learn what to look for inside the files so I can hopefully pull the information out of the other games I'm interested in. I'm figuring that Lunar should be too much more difficult, but Grandia might be (being a 3D environment). Thanks agian! P.S. Anyone have experience with SegaCD image extraction? I dusted off my versions of Lunar for that too and thought about giving those a crack too.

		IBarracudaI		Dec 17, 2003
			TAKTOOLS... Edit: The file is here in SX's server, however the link on dev section is incorrectly spelled... it links to tactools.zip and should be taktools.zip

		Termite		Dec 18, 2003
			Many thanks IBarracudaI! TakaIsSilly, can you tell me which MKR file you are decoding in the documentation? I haven't been able to get any of the files to work so far, so it would be helpful to know what to look for in a given file to get some practice. Edit: Is it possible to get the source code to TakTools? I think it would be helpful to see where the program is looking for various information and how. Thanks again all!