hi!! i hope you don't mind the ask ^^ i was wondering about how you got started with sprite ripping, specifically through tinke, because im trying to learn myself so i can rip as much as i can from the d.gray-man ds game and well..... it's definitely quite the process and im really unfamiliar with these things ;;^_^ i actually found your blog while searching for information which is why i thought to send an ask :0
Hey! I'm pretty flattered you thought to ask me!
So, I'm gonna go through several games, because it highly depends on the game and what you see. That way you have a lot of examples to work with.
Let's start with Death Note: Successor to L as that is the game I'm most know for ripping the sprites from. It is also a bit unstraight forward, which helps some things in explaining.
Upon opening the .nds file in Tinke, this is what we see.
Locate the "data" folder, click the +.
See this data.bin? Despite its icon, we do not want to unpack it.
Instead, we want to Open as > compress
You'll get a popup window called "Select Offset". Don't do anything; just click "Accept".
After a second of waiting, suddenly we have this huge list of new .bins! So where do we find the images?
Scroll until you find the LAST [IPAL] .bin. Everything under it will be the game's sprites.
So, everything under "data_15108.bin [IPAL]" in this case. So...where are the images?
Under it is data_15109.bin. And under that, data_15110.bin. Open as > compress them both.
Based on icon, we can see we have a palette file and a tile file. First, we have to open the palette file as a palette.
Now, let's see what happens if we open the tile file now... (as a tile, of course)
Well...that doesn't look right. For reference, this is the sprite in question:
So, why does it look like that?
What if we manually adjusted the width? You can hold down the up or down arrow to see it change in real time.
But setting it to 128.... (half)
Looks about the right size, just...cut off. We'd have to adjust the height, too.
Or, we can try opening it as a map instead and see if that helps. So let's try opening this file as map instead.
Ah! Did all the work for us! But...where's the other half of the sprite? And why are the colors weird?
Let's Open as > compress the .bin below...
...Well, there's the other half. So, you'll have to stitch them together. Ok, what about the colors?
This is where the palette comes in. Tinke will use the colors of the last palette you viewed. Thankfully, we know this is Light's palette since the palette file precedes all his sprites. But why is it showing up wonky?
See these bold colors up top? This is our issue. We need only one of these bold colors that is clearly not supposed to be a color in Light's sprite. Why? Because that will be the color of the sprite's background (which we can edit out later.)
See this start byte button? Keep clicking up, you will see the squares slowly move backwards (idk how to describe it, just hold down the up button and see for yourself). Do it until only the last bold color remains. Cyan, here.
Now, let's go reopen the image as map.
Perfect! You can even click that "Transparency" button to turn the bold color transparent.
Now, all you have to do is click "Export"
Here's the output:
Of course, the same will have to be done with the sprite below it, and then you'll have to stitch them together in any editing software or art software (MS paint, firealpaca are both free) and there you go! the sprite :)
Now, not all games are like this. So let's look at another.
Let's do Pokemon Black 2 (this is the JP version but as far as I know, both games have the same file paths)
Already, this looks WAY different. No Data folder. Just an "a" folder, with a million sub folders. How are we ever gonna find what we want?
Well, there's 2 answers. One is Google. I googled "Pokemon Black 2 sprite files locations" and got this answer:
So a > 0 > 0 > 4...
But what if Google doesn't have an answer?
Well...Sorry to say, at that point, it's a game of trial and error. You're going to have check everything yourself (that's what I had to do with the Death Note game).
But back to Pokemon. So, I open as > compress....
A little different here, too. But If I had to guess, 4_19.RLCN is our palette, and 4_20.bin (after we open as compress) will be our image.
Right I am. But opening the image as map, it still looks weird. I'll mess with the width - that usually works.
Just a few clicks of the down arrow and we got Bulbasaur.
However, this palette doesn't look like Bulbasaur at all. There's no green or anything...maybe the actual palette it at the bottom there?
So it is! You can tell just by looking at the colors that this is meant to be for Bulbasaur. The greens, blues, and reds for the mouth. Now, the question is how to get the right palette on it...
Unlike Light's palette from earlier, this one is much smaller, so we can tell the palette size is actually 16/16, not 256/1
Just switch it over.
I did 40 for the offset again, as this seems to be a regular number used for palette offsets.
And wouldn't you know it!!
Okay, I've hit image limit so i'll stop here. But I hope this helps. Some games are encrypted or use file types not recognized by Tinke, so if you're having additional troubles you can message me again :) otherwise I hope this helps. When in doubt just try opening everything and anything lol.
