Trying to figure out how to rip a specific menu element

[puggsoy]

OK, so I managed to decompress them using CUE's NDS Decompressing tool (for some reason DSDecmp doesn't work) and open them in NTFR. Now the issue is making a TTF, unfortunately there's no straightforward converter or anything. There are 2 ways I can think of doing this:

1. Use BitFontMaker to manually make it. It's a pretty easy to use tool, and it has a 16x16 grid. You can use it as an 8x8 grid by making each pixel 4 pixels instead, and then just copying each character from the zoom grid in the Character Map option of NTFRedit. However, this will only work for the fonts that are made of 8x8 tiles, which are the ones with "0808" in the name.
   
2. The other option is trying out the method explained here. I haven't tested it but it looks like your best shot for any fonts that aren't 8x8 tiled.
   

The fact of the matter is that computer fonts are vectors (hence they can be scaled) while DS (and most consoles) use bitmap fonts, so converting between them isn't easy. Hopefully the above is helpful to you though.

Also, when reading about decompressing these files I discovered that the same compression is used for those .bin files (someone mentioned LZ40, and I remembered seeing a 40 at the start of each .bin). Surely enough, after decompression I'm seeing some nice, readable pixel data (8bpp if I'm not mistaken). No palettes though, so they're probably stored as separate files in the ROM.

I'm actually getting excited so I'll go and dig them up myself

EDIT: Yessiree, stdpalet.bin seems to contain the palette data for all the graphics. Quickly giving it a shot with command_ui_tip2.bin in TiledGG



It's just 8bpp linear, and the palette is 2 bytes per colour BGR. Not sure how to detect file dimensions though, I'll look around some more.

EDIT2: Each individual face file has a corresponding palette (e.g. crown_0.bin and crown_0_pltt.bin), both of which are compressed:



This will most likely be the case with any other files you find with corresponding palette files (i.e. if you find two files with the same name, but one of them has "pal" or "pltt" or something added).

Faces seem to all be 64x64, but I have no idea where the image data for other images might be. Your best bet might be simply opening them with TiledGGD and figuring out the sizes yourself, then ripping them that way. I mean it's easier than hard-ripping, at least.