ROM Hack How the heck do I edit DS graphics?

[WataruKun]

I've been working on a game that uses standard DS graphics like .NCGR and that kind of stuff. Now, I've looked around for info on how to view these files, but all I get is threads on "Crystaltile" which can apparently view them. But I've been using Crystaltile and I've had no such luck.

 

[WataruKun]

Guess a guy has to fuigure out this stuff on his own then.

 

[FAST6191]

A guy might also have to wait more than 7 and a half hours to get an answer to a semi technical question.

Still assuming you are just dealing with nitro SDK compliant formats and no compression (well compression is not much of a problem either) then crystaltile2 is indeed what you want.

Simple way:
Start by opening the rom in crystaltile2.
Select the tile viewer.
Press the button in the top right of the toolbars that looks like a DS, this will parse the DS file system and allow you to see what is going on.
Find your images of choice and right click on them, one of the last options you see (will probably be bounded by lines) will load up the image.
For SDK standard files there may be two other files of the same name but different extension (not always but a good chunk of the time), right click and do the same for them and the palette should load and the tiles will be arranged and/or padded to form the full image.
You can doodle here or you can export if you like and edit somewhere else.

Minor tweak if the files are inside a narc file is you open the narc file in the same way as above and then you should be able to proceed as usual. Same idea for any other format that crystaltile2 supports.

 

[WataruKun]

A guy might also have to wait more than 7 and a half hours to get an answer to a semi technical question.

Still assuming you are just dealing with nitro SDK compliant formats and no compression (well compression is not much of a problem either) then crystaltile2 is indeed what you want.

Simple way:
Start by opening the rom in crystaltile2.
Select the tile viewer.
Press the button in the top right of the toolbars that looks like a DS, this will parse the DS file system and allow you to see what is going on.
Find your images of choice and right click on them, one of the last options you see (will probably be bounded by lines) will load up the image.
For SDK standard files there may be two other files of the same name but different extension (not always but a good chunk of the time), right click and do the same for them and the palette should load and the tiles will be arranged and/or padded to form the full image.
You can doodle here or you can export if you like and edit somewhere else.

Minor tweak if the files are inside a narc file is you open the narc file in the same way as above and then you should be able to proceed as usual. Same idea for any other format that crystaltile2 supports.

Thanks for that. And yeah, I'm sorry for being impatient, but there's not really much documentation on how to do this(Most people just say 'use Crystaltile2' with no explanation on what to do).

 

[PotatoChips]

I have a question related to this, I tried using CrystalTile2 and I only see garbled colors and graphics. I tried randomly selecting files and for the most part, they're all "unreadable"(random colors).

I'm just trying to find some image in the ROM to edit.

Any help will be appreciated.

 

[twiztidsinz]

I have a question related to this, I tried using CrystalTile2 and I only see garbled colors and graphics. I tried randomly selecting files and for the most part, they're all "unreadable"(random colors).

I'm just trying to find some image in the ROM to edit.

Any help will be appreciated.

I'm sure someone can better explain it than me, but...
The colors are off because each image has a specific pallet of colors that it uses. And that information (or some other information) is stored in the beginning of the file that offsets the image causing it to be distorted.

 

[Poryhack]

If you're just browsing for images, I've found tahaxan much easier to use. Try extracting the containing NARC once you've found an image to edit with tahaxan, and then opening than in CrystalTile2 and editing it.

 

[PotatoChips]

Thanks for the responses. I tried using tahaxan, a lot of the files found in the ROM are .pac files, besides .pac, the only other file types are: .ncg, .nsc, .ncl .

I found the image files(under utility.bin) for just "text images"(.ncg?).

I randomly clicked and viewed a bunch of them and it does seem to be text images but that's all I seem to find.

Text image that seems to be part of the menu but I can't figure out a lot of them.


Though I can not seem to find any in game images(such as an image of a character's face) in the ROM.

As for what image I am trying to find and why I am editing it.

I'm trying to edit a character image in yugioh stardust accelerator. In the storyline, there is a part where your character is forced to get a marking on his or her face.

While playing the card game, you see the face of your character all the time(it's just a simple image), so it got annoying for me to look at the mark on my character's face so I am trying to find and edit the image of the mark on my character's face, since I liked it a lot better without the mark.


Anyway using Tahaxan, I found image files under utility.bin/char folder(which I think char stands for character/text). And the folder seems to contain images of just text for the game menus and stuff.

But besides those, I can't seem to find anything else.

There are a lot of pac files, what are those and could images be in the pac files? I can't do anything with them besides extracting the file.

 

[jceggbert5]

I am having a similar problem, but I want to change a title screen logo, and CrystalTile and TileMolester both give me garbled images. How do I remove the pallete from the beginning of the file so that it can be used? Or how can I get it to recognize the pallete?