Hi all,
I'm a new user but have been browsing this forum for months looking for resources, and you all seem to be very knowledgeable. I'm hoping at least one person out there can help me figure out what's going on here. I try to keep everything documented as well as possible but I'm not well-versed in programming and hacking lingo and I'm not always sure which parts are important. Forgive me if I end up overcompensating and dumping way more info than necessary :~)
rom.bin
After a quick search of how to extract graphics from NDS roms, I downloaded consoletool and opened my Spore Creatures rom in it. It loads, but all the files shown in consoletool are .bin that I can't do anything with in that program. Then I downloaded apicula and successfully used it to extract DS files from rom.bin. This gave me a folder with several thousand files, all of which are .nsbca or .nsbta; no model, texture, sprite files, etc. apicula gives me info on these files in terms of x-y position, objects, and frames, which I assume refer to how the animations apply to model parts.
romFileNames.bin
This is one of the only other files on the rom. apicula can't get anything out of it. However, when I open it in Notepad++, I can see that romFileNames.bin contains strings for .nsbmd files (also .nsbca,
.nsbta, .bin, .dat, .2lz, .pal, .bsp, .fizz, .sporeta, .leganim). I can guess that .fizz, .sporeta, and .leganim are file types unique to this game and therefore I probably won't be able to do anything with them. My question is how can I get the normal .nsbmd files out of romFileNames.bin, or wherever they are in the data? In searching for information about romFileNames.bin I found only one result, a thread on a different forum from 2016. In it a user provides some code I don't understand and says "There's some compression that I'm not sure what it is." They link a .zip file that contains two .nsbmd files that apicula doesn't recognize. I can see the names of these files in the romFileNames.bin text.
All I'm trying to do is extract models/sprites of the game's overworld (stuff like flowers and fruit etc.), but my assumption is that because this game is rendered in a kind of papercraft style with "2d" models that rotate and flip in the 3d overworld, it probably uses some uncommon code that typical rom editors can't parse. I'd like to know if there's any way for me to grab graphical assets from this at all. I don't need to repack anything or make sure the data stays intact really, I just want some image or model files to play around with.
I'm nowhere near qualified enough to write any kind of custom program to deal with this stuff, so if that's my only option, I'll have to move on. I just want to know if it's possible to extract these assets with the programs available online before I give up. Thanks in advance to anyone who can help.
I'm a new user but have been browsing this forum for months looking for resources, and you all seem to be very knowledgeable. I'm hoping at least one person out there can help me figure out what's going on here. I try to keep everything documented as well as possible but I'm not well-versed in programming and hacking lingo and I'm not always sure which parts are important. Forgive me if I end up overcompensating and dumping way more info than necessary :~)
rom.bin
After a quick search of how to extract graphics from NDS roms, I downloaded consoletool and opened my Spore Creatures rom in it. It loads, but all the files shown in consoletool are .bin that I can't do anything with in that program. Then I downloaded apicula and successfully used it to extract DS files from rom.bin. This gave me a folder with several thousand files, all of which are .nsbca or .nsbta; no model, texture, sprite files, etc. apicula gives me info on these files in terms of x-y position, objects, and frames, which I assume refer to how the animations apply to model parts.
romFileNames.bin
This is one of the only other files on the rom. apicula can't get anything out of it. However, when I open it in Notepad++, I can see that romFileNames.bin contains strings for .nsbmd files (also .nsbca,
.nsbta, .bin, .dat, .2lz, .pal, .bsp, .fizz, .sporeta, .leganim). I can guess that .fizz, .sporeta, and .leganim are file types unique to this game and therefore I probably won't be able to do anything with them. My question is how can I get the normal .nsbmd files out of romFileNames.bin, or wherever they are in the data? In searching for information about romFileNames.bin I found only one result, a thread on a different forum from 2016. In it a user provides some code I don't understand and says "There's some compression that I'm not sure what it is." They link a .zip file that contains two .nsbmd files that apicula doesn't recognize. I can see the names of these files in the romFileNames.bin text.
All I'm trying to do is extract models/sprites of the game's overworld (stuff like flowers and fruit etc.), but my assumption is that because this game is rendered in a kind of papercraft style with "2d" models that rotate and flip in the 3d overworld, it probably uses some uncommon code that typical rom editors can't parse. I'd like to know if there's any way for me to grab graphical assets from this at all. I don't need to repack anything or make sure the data stays intact really, I just want some image or model files to play around with.
I'm nowhere near qualified enough to write any kind of custom program to deal with this stuff, so if that's my only option, I'll have to move on. I just want to know if it's possible to extract these assets with the programs available online before I give up. Thanks in advance to anyone who can help.
