ROM Hack Help with editing character portraits in Harvest Moon DS Cute

[Lisios]

I'm sure an answer to this question must exist somewhere, but after looking up every topic I can find I just can't find a solid guide or answer.

I want to edit the character portraits in Harvest Moon DS Cute. I've played around with Crystal Tile 2 and Texture Molestor, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to unscramble the files, find the right palette, and locate the character portrait textures. I've managed to find character sprites, but I haven't been able to unscramble them enough into full images, the most I can get is bits and pieces of the full image, but that's it. I also haven't been able to find the correct palette after multiple attempts. And when it comes to the character portraits I haven't been able to find even small sections of the portraits.

Any help would be useful!

 

[justadrawer]

i did something similar a while back. i'll share what i remember.
the face.bin file in the rom has the portrait data, but it's compressed, so if you just open it up normally, it looks like garbage data. i extracted that file and opened it in GBA graphics editor, where i was able to dump the raw uncompressed portraits and open them in tile molester. and yeah, they were sort of scrambled like you described, but they were intelligible enough that i could do what i wanted.
to find the palette info, i opened up the face.bin file in a hex editor and searched for the bytes "e0 03", which is used as like a green screen and is usually the first color in any given palette. the palette info doesn't seem to be compressed, so directing GBAGE's palette control to that offset will display the image with the given palette. and something that i discovered is that the portraits have two distinct palettes, one for the top half, and one for the bottom half. for instance, if the first half of a portrait's palette is located at offset 1ac, then the second half will be located at offset 1cc. if that makes sense.
as for the sprites, if you mess around with offsets and whatnot in tile molester, you can get individual sprites to match up completely. all the sprites won't match up at once, but you can get whatever sprite you're working on to align until you need to work on the next one. and similarly, searching for the bytes "e0 03" will help you find the start of the palette for them.