ROM Hack Extracting sprites from SRW K, L, and W

[CrashmanX]

I've been trying out quite a few different tools today (mind you this is my first day trying this) and I can't seem to get any luck getting sprites out of the SRW DS titles. Has anyone had any luck ripping sprites out of the DS SRW titles? There's some form of encryption on them and I haven't really dug into figuring out what the encryption is and before I do I was wondering if anyone else had luck getting them out.

I've been trying out quite a few programs but DS Lazy seems to be the easiest and worked best for extracting everything. Right now I have a TON of .bin files, 3 of which look to contain all the game data but the other 90+ seem to contain the sprite or background data. Not sure which.

I could go by hand and go frame by frame and rip sprites manually like that using DeSmuME, but that's a LOT of sprites to be ripping from an SRW title. I mean, have you seen all those attacks? There's a lot.

 

[Noelemahc]

From what I've read of people smarter than me posting on Romhacking, these games use some form of LZ compression for most of their content. Try going at it from a different direction: use an emulator with a debugger to see which parts of the ROM are called when attack animations are loaded, this may guide you to a specific file.

AFAIK, all the existing sprite rips of the games are VRAM dumps done through emulators, which is why there's so few of them.

You can also try using SupaRobo Gakuen, the forgotten SRW game, as it features almost all the robots from SRW J, W and K, and most of its content is uncompressed.

 

[CrashmanX]

From what I've read of people smarter than me posting on Romhacking, these games use some form of LZ compression for most of their content. Try going at it from a different direction: use an emulator with a debugger to see which parts of the ROM are called when attack animations are loaded, this may guide you to a specific file.

AFAIK, all the existing sprite rips of the games are VRAM dumps done through emulators, which is why there's so few of them.

You can also try using SupaRobo Gakuen, the forgotten SRW game, as it features almost all the robots from SRW J, W and K, and most of its content is uncompressed.

Oh my god and it even uses the same sprites. You're a life saver man.

EDIT: OK, well I see the "btlPicDat.bin" and I can open it using 7Zip, but I've got no idea on how to extract the content. 7Zip recognizes it uses LZMA compression, but I'll be honest I have no idea what that means or how to get around it.

 

[Noelemahc]

From what I know (I'm self-teaching pointer script insertion on that game, because a) it's actually fun, like an SRW PKMN, and b) nobody will care if I fail as that game is incredibly obscure) of DS games, there's usually a proprietary form of LZ used by them. Try looking at Romhacking's tool section, I believe I've seen a lot of variable-mode compressor/decompressors.
I just hadn't yet done anything related to graphics in it.

 

[Normmatt]

These use the same formats as several gba games I reversed last year and I released an animation viewer for all the supported gba games. Though my viewer doesn't work on these DS games though it probably wouldn't be hard to add support when/if I get enough motivation to do so.

 

[CrashmanX]

These use the same formats as several gba games I reversed last year and I released an animation viewer for all the supported gba games. Though my viewer doesn't work on these DS games though it probably wouldn't be hard to add support when/if I get enough motivation to do so.

Oh! That'd be most excellent if you ever did that! I'm going to assume it wouldn't be a simple thing for someone who knows nothing about DS compression to do.

From what I know (I'm self-teaching pointer script insertion on that game, because a) it's actually fun, like an SRW PKMN, and b) nobody will care if I fail as that game is incredibly obscure) of DS games, there's usually a proprietary form of LZ used by them. Try looking at Romhacking's tool section, I believe I've seen a lot of variable-mode compressor/decompressors.
I just hadn't yet done anything related to graphics in it.

I just looked through and I couldn't find anything to decompress. I see a compression program, but not a decompression program.

 

[Noelemahc]

I just looked through and I couldn't find anything to decompress. I see a compression program, but not a decompression program.

http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/973/
I'm stuck on mobile for a while so I can't actually test whether this will do anything, but that's not the only one out there.

 

[CrashmanX]

http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/973/
I'm stuck on mobile for a while so I can't actually test whether this will do anything, but that's not the only one out there.

Weird. When I was looking through the tools I couldn't find that one.

Well it "works". I can see that images are there, just most of them are compressed and not able to be made out and those that can are in Black/White because it can't find the palette data.

 

[Noelemahc]

Have you had any luck with this? I'll try to look into it from my end, will help me clear my head from the endless cycle of failing to kill Lude Gloria with an underleveled team in L.