People have been asking how I ripped all that stuff from the games, so I thought I'd expand the small section on ripping that I used to have at the bottom of the page.
PSX Fix Selection By Anapan
Use these selections to fix 4BPP (16 color) PSX grahpics extracted with raw graphic/sprite viewing utilities like Peekin's SpriteView. If you're using a dos utility, take a screenshot of the nybble-swapped graphics and paste them into Paint Shop Pro. Resize them to 50%, then load psxfix.sel from the selections menu and drag it 2 pixels to the right.
PSmplay By Segu http://segu.psxemu.com/
Rips several PSX format files, I think it's the best XA player/ripper that exists. You can use it to save all the music and dialogue from SOTN as wave files.
TileLayer Pro By Snowbro
Mainly a tile editor, it can view and edit many formats of sprites, including GBA. It even lets you edit the colors you see in the tile viewer and then save a block of tiles as a BMP. Unfortunately, it's minimum viewing width makes viewing COTM character sprites properly impossible.
PSXSND By SM0N of the Hitmen http://www.hitmen-console.org/
Rips individual wave files from PSX Format VAB/VAG/VB+VH sound archives. It's what I used to rip all the SOTN Sound Effects. They need their sample rates adjusted after ripping as the PSX uses them like instruments, playing them at different tones.
PCMConv By Chie http://www.netfarm.ne.jp/~chie/
Convert many formats of PCM encoded audio to any other format (including PC Engine format ADPCM). I ran the Rondo of Blood ISO through it using this command line: "pcmconv -ir8000 -or8000 -if 9 -of 4 dracx.iso converted.wav" and got an 80 megabyte wav file. All the sounds in the game were in between large blocks of garbage static.
PsxMultiRipper By Loser http://www.loser-console.org/psx/
Rip PSX format TIM graphics from larger files. There are many tools to do this, but this one is by far the best, finding more then any of the other programs I've tried. You can run it on the PAC file found in Castlevania Chronicles to get most of the graphics from it.
Susie Graphic Viewer by Takechin http://www.digitalpad.co.jp/~takechin/
A japanese graphic viewer that has has plugins made for it to view more graphic formats that you even knew existed. Susie Tim Plugin By Kurobosi
Copy this plugin into your Susie directory to view TIM files, and save them as BMPs.
Seq2mid By ASR http://homepage1.nifty.com/asr/tools/seq2mid.html
Convert PSX format SEQ (Sample-embedded Midi) files to normal windows Midi format. Works on the Master Librarian's theme, and the confession-booth bells from the Chapel.
HiColEd By MrClick http://mrclick.zophar.net/TilEd/download/
View 15Bpp Graphics. Specifically, monster.bin from the BIN dir of SOTN. This data file has all the enemy pictures in the librarian's monster guide. Just set the width to 96, and click on the first black pixel to align the picture you want to look at. I sometimes use these pics to recolor sprites I've ripped because I think Bleem might not be as accurate as these pictures are.
SNES Palette Editor By Yousei http://lfx.org/yousei/
Views and changes palette data. I found some palettes in SOTN stuff. It may be useful in finding the address of palette information when we attempt to use SOTN's original level data to create backgrounds.
Camtasia/Bleem Ripping Tutorial By Anapan
When I first started ripping sprites, some Dungeonites wanted to know how I did it, so I wrote this up to put on the page. It's not my preffered method anymore, but it's still useful.
A few notes on exactly how I use some of these utilities:
NITM .CHR files:
SpriteView in linear 4bpp mode (press 4)
press "p" untill you find a good palette (greyscale usually works best)
press [end] to get the the bottom, then scroll up a bit with the Up Arrow
press "[" and "]" to get the right width (start small)
now just keep using the left& right arrows, the [ and ] keys and up and down arrows until you find a good sprite.
press the PrintScreen key to copy the screen into the clipboard, press alt-tab or escape to get back to windows, and paste the clipboard into Paint Shop Pro
Resize the picture to 50% using the pixel-resize method.
SOTN .BIN files & Chronicles PAC file:
SpriteView in linear 4bpp mode (press 4)
press "p" untill you find a good palette (greyscale usually works best)
press [ or ] to find the right width for the file you're using. 128, and 256 are the most common widths.
Try to find something that looks like it should be something. The graphics are Nybble-swapped so they will look messed up (Spikes on the top and bottom).
press PrintScreen and paste the screen into Paint Shop Pro
Resize the image to 50% (Pixel Resize).
From the Selection Menu, choose "Load from disk" and find PsxFix.sel
choose any selection tool, and drag the selection over 2 pixels to the right.
Ronod of Blood ISO:
Tmod2 in CHR Mode (load file, press F3, press "8")
Press the Down Arrow, and PageDown key till you see something interesting. You have to go down a really long way to find any of the later stages.
use the . and , keys to get the right width
use the ; and ' keys to get a good palette
press PrintScreen and paste the screen into Paint Shop Pro
Resize the image to 50% (Pixel Resize)
From the View menu, choose Change Grid & Guide Properties
Set the grid to 16x16
Now from the view menu, choose View Grid
Select the the rectangle selection tool, and use the grid to help you re-arrange the tiles to assemble the sprites in their entirety (some need the be assembled more precicely by selecting a piece, then making the transparent color- Ctrl-T the same color as the background - usually black).
COTM Rom:
SpriteView in Sega Genesis mode (press 5)
Go down really far with the pagedown key (like 300000 or more) until you see sprite shapes (will be messed up a bit still)
change the width to around 32 with the [ and ] keys
Adjust the sprite blocks until each 8x8 block is whole by holding the ctrl key and pressing the right and left arrow keys.
use the right and left arrow keys and the [ and ] keys to get a whole sprite.
press PrintScreen and paste the screen into PSP
Resize the image to 50% (pixel resize)
From the Selection Menu, choose "Load from disk" and find PsxFix.sel
choose any selection tool, and drag the selection over 2 pixels to the right.
Now that you've gotten your sprites all perfect except the colors, you'll want to recolor them. The best way I've found is to use the Eye-Dropper and Color Changer tools in PSP.
Get an emulator screen shot of one of the sprites you ripped using the sprite viewer
Make sure your color changer tool has it's brush width set to 255
Press "y" and left-click on a color in the emulator sprite, then right-click on the same pixel in the ripped sprite.
press "," and and left-click on the ripped sprite (if your page of ripped sprites is fairly large, make sure that all of the sprites have been recolored)
Repeat the "y" "," procedure for the rest of the colors untill your sprites are all recolored properly. Now you can safely decrease their color depth.
from the color menu, choose Decrease Color Depth -> 16 Colors
make sure the settings are Optimised Octree, Nearest Color
Now you can safely save them as GIF files, without losing any of the original details. A perfect rip.
Ripping from emulators:
I probably don't have to cover this, but some people may not know, so here's a few tips
ZSNES:
Disable all but the Sprite layer using the number keys
Press F1
Make sure it's saving as PNG (otherwise the files take up alot of space if you rip lots)
Select "Incr Frame Only" until the sprite you want to rip is at the frame you want
Select "Save Snapshot/Incr Frame"
Select "Incr Frame only" until the sprite changes
Genecyst:
From the View menu, disable all but the Sprites
Press Alt-P to pause
Press F9 to take a screen shot (PCX format in the same directory as Genecyst)
Tap Alt-A repeatedly until it's at the next frame
Press F9 again
Nesticle:
From the Settings menu, choose Disable BG
Press Alt-P to pause
Press F9 to take a screen shot (PCX format in the same directory as Nesticle)
Tap Alt-A repeatedly until it's at the next frame
Press F9 again
Load the screenshots into Paint Shop Pro and choose Edit Palette from the color menu
Change palette entry 16 to a bright color so you can see the black outline of the enemy sprites.
Magic Engine (98)
Press "7" to disable the background
press "1" on the numeric keypad to slow the emulation to 10%
press backspace to take a screen shot (I recommend pressing it a whole lot so you get everything)
Oh, one last thing. Richter and Alucard's Sprites
I'd wanted to rip them for over a year, but had given up as they were always too jumbled to fix, when one day I accidentally loaded Alucard's sprite file into spriteview, and decided to give it another go.
The main problem was originally that the Nybble-swapped graphics were unknown to me and I didn't know how to fix them (the PsxFix selection does that nicely now - thanks to an email from Peekin), but even then I couldn't fix some of the sprites. After a little messing around I realized that they were 4 pixels too thin, and the viewer only handles increments of 8. So, I finally figured out how I might be able to fix it. I needed to rip the sprites double width, and then combine the 2 sliced up sections into one sprite.
So... here's how you do it.
Load either arc_f.bin or ric.bin from the bin directory of SOTN into SpriteView and find a sprite that you can't get aligned right (will be all slanted)
now adjust the width using the "]" key until the sprite's twice the width it should be (there will be 2 coppies, both very short and very distorted)
copy and paste the screen into PSP, then resize to 50% x 50%
load psxfix.sel and drag it 2 pixels to the right
resize the image to 100% x 200% (deselect Maintain Aspect Ratio)
load psxfix2.sel and drag it up one pixel, and to the right until it aligns with the second copy of the sprite.
Woohoo, a perfect Alucard/Richter sprite.
