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m thinking of a new tool
TakaIsSilly - Oct 14, 2001
  TakaIsSilly Oct 14, 2001
*EDIT: I'll make this a coherent speech*

Well, i've been working on a program that can decode 256 color palleted pics.

The concept came to me when Arakon posted asking for a pallete ripper.

It made me think on all the games that have a proprietary format for images, with the pallete in diferent locations, etc. I've now been succesfull extracting stuff like the BG's and intro screen from MKR with it.

Anyway, no release yet. Just wanted to avoid the forum pointing to that awfull VF tread. ^o^

(Edited by TakaIsSilly at 4:13 pm on Oct. 19, 2001)

 MasterAkumaMatata Oct 15, 2001
Cool!!!

BTW, any chance of improving the Pakread... image reader/converter?

 TakaIsSilly Oct 16, 2001
Well, it seems simmilar to the stuff I was decoding. If I can find an allegro version that runs with Visual C++, we'll talk. What were the "improvements" you were thinking?

 Artemio Urbina Oct 16, 2001
Great job Takashi =), Let us now when we can try it...

 CyberWarriorX Oct 16, 2001
There actually is a version of allegro for vc++. Just go to allegro's homepage.

Cyber Warrior X

 CyberWarriorX Oct 16, 2001
BTW Taka, have you considered writing any other kind of converters? Like perhaps a CNV -> MID converter or something along those lines?

 TakaIsSilly Oct 17, 2001
Just DL'ed it. When I get my pc back, you'll see the results. As for converters, CNV files provably have more data than a MIDI stream, and also have some kind of raw sound data (since it behaves kinda like a AWE64 sound card). Besides, image converting it's _so_ mutch easier.

 CyberWarriorX Oct 17, 2001
From what I understood CNV files themselves are mostly converted midi data(they just optimized the files by converting certain midi commands to their own saturn format). Of course alot of developers themselves liked to make a data library out of all their CNV files + tone data + map data + whatever else I missed... Anyways, I also have the format specs if you want it.

Cyber Warrior X

 MasterAkumaMatata Oct 17, 2001

  
	
	

		
		

			Quote: from TakaIsSilly on 6:26 am on Oct. 16, 2001



Well, it seems simmilar to the stuff I was decoding. If I can find an allegro version that runs with Visual C++, we'll talk. What were the "improvements" you were thinking?

The last time I tried Pakread on the .PAK files for Street Fighter Alpha 2 (US version), the output was quite weird. Say like you have an 8.5x11 inch paper, imagine that's the relative size of the converted picture. Now imagine a small box (e.g., 3x4 inch) aligned near the top of the paper, and imagine that box represents the picture that you see when viewed on the TV monitor while playing the game in Illustrations Mode.

If I can find Pakread.zip that I've downloaded a while back and test it again (link at SX seems to be down at the moment), I'll create a screenshot and post the link here for you to see what I mean.

The improvement, as you may have guessed, would be to have the converted picture to crop to its correct size, if possible.

 TakaIsSilly Oct 18, 2001
Ohh!, that's the Allegro library save as PCX function problem... I'll se what I can do

 TakaIsSilly Oct 18, 2001
here's some of the stuff i was able to rip :





All the little faces that appear in the GUI of MKR... not the in-game ones, tough...



also these backdrops in the load game menu, and generally, all the BG's of the MKR GUI.



Oh my, a SEGA logo in the MKR CD. How unexpected --;



Finally, this title screen and the random backgrounds of the options menu from Dead or Alive.



Nice, huh? I'm not releasing now because the tools need a little tutorial to be used

... BTW, the tools are in QuickBasic, again. Prepare yourselfs for _slow_ operation --;. I really need to start coding in C, but i'm _sooo_ lazy.

*ups, HTML typo*

(Edited by TakaIsSilly at 8:58 pm on Oct. 18, 2001)

 MasterAkumaMatata Oct 18, 2001
Very nice!

 Artemio Urbina Oct 19, 2001
Way to go! Great work Takashi.

Those look great! I could port it to C if you want.... Although I know you can do it in a minute if you really want to...

 IceDigger Oct 19, 2001
Very cool indeed!

 TakaIsSilly Oct 19, 2001
Well, here is the final result :

A total sum of 3 tools, including an "interactive" program and an alpha of a program to decode 15-bit images.

http://www.clubotaku.org/Saturn/taktools.zip...

Also, those are not _easy_ tools. Read the included guide. If you were unable to deal with my previous image conversion tool, you're in for a treat.

 MasterAkumaMatata Oct 19, 2001
Awesome!!! I'll try it out as soon as I get home from work.