Binxelview tool for locating image data in files

[rainwarrior]

I made this tool a little while ago to help myself find uncompressed image data, maps, or otherwise look for grid-organized data in files.

Since being able to find sprites in game data files and ROMs was one of the big reasons I wanted the tool, I thought others here might like to know about it:

https://github.com/bbbradsmith/binxelview


Simple tutorial:

1. Drag the file you want to inspect onto the window (or use the file menu to open it).
   
2. Adjust the "width" parameter and look at the data, with the right width images will start to line up.
   
3. Once the width is figured out, adjust the height and the starting position to bring the images into alignment.
   

That's the basic idea. It can handle a lot of different arbitrary formats for packing bits. The default is 8BPP (8 bits / 1 byte per pixel) but the display format is very customizable. If you have an educated guess about the format, you can select that instead. There are presets for the native data formats of a few platforms already, but you can make your own presets too.

For some things, you can just save the images directly out of the tool. I've very quickly found a lot of font sets this way, and it's easy to just resize the window to put them in a nice grid and then save directly out of the tool. Other times it's just a starting point for figuring out where the data is stored, and what format it might be in. For instance, you will normally need to come up with a colour palette for the images separately.


Here's a twitter thread with a few screenshots that kinda show what it can do, and a brief animation showing how I used it recently for finding textures in a Dreamcast game.


It's completely free and open source. No strings attached.