Super Star Ultra

[Jermungandr]

Instructions on how to rip this game via Tile Molester:

Part 1: Exporting the Sprite Files

1) First, go here and download Tahaxan - Tihaxa. Unpack the Zip.

2) Download the proper runtimes for Tahaxan here. Put them in the Tahaxan folder.

3) Run Tahaxan. Click the "Open NDS Rom" button at the top left and choose your KSSU rom.

4) Open the Rom folder that appears (it should be the only folder on the screen) to bring up a slew of other oddly named files.

- If you are looking for Kirby's ability sprites or Helper sprites, they are in the folder named "pd". In this folder, the files that start with the letter "a" contain any sprites that are unique to that specific ability. The files that start with the letter "c" contain the hat sprites for that ability that are placed on Kirby's normal sprites. The files that start with "h" contain all the sprites for a specific helper. The final file, called "shot", contains all the hat items that Kirby throws.

- If you are looking for boss sprites, they are in the folder named "b10". Not every file in this folder contains actual sprites, though. The ones that do are:

b0 = Whispy / Twin Woods
b1 = Whispy's Apple
b2 = Whispy's Apple (again?)
b6 = Lololo & Lalala
b7 = Kracko
b8 = Misc. SFX
b9 = King Dedede
b10 = Dyna Blade
b11 = Kirby sprites for cutscene after Dyna Blade fight
b16 = Fatty Whale SFX
b20 = Computer Virus Windows
b21 = Computer Virus SFX
b22 = Computer Virus SFX
b23 = Computer Virus Slime
b24 = Computer Virus Doll
b25 = Computer Virus Magician
b26 = Computer Virus Knight
b27 = Computer Virus Dragon
b36 = Chameleo Arm
b40 = Wham Bam Rock
b42 = Heavy Lobster
b44 = Combo Cannon
b45 = Combo Cannon SFX
b47 = Halberd Reactor SFX
b48 = Meta Knight
b49 = Winged Meta Knight
b50 = Heart of Nova
b51 = Marx
b56 = Kabula
b59 = Unused map sprite
b62 = "GET IT!" Hammer platform
b63 = Masked Dedede SFX
b65 = Masked Dedede
b66 = Lololo & Lalala's Revenge
b67 = Kracko's Revenge
b68 = Galacta Knight
b70 = Marx Soul
b92 = Grand Wheelie(?)

- Regular enemies/minibosses haven't been found yet.

Using Tile Molester on the Extracted Files

1) Download Tile Molester if you haven't already.

2) Download tmspec.xml (right click + save link as). Replace the old tmspec.xml file in your Tile Molester folder with this one.

3) Now open Tile Molester, and click the Open button. The sprite files you extracted won't be recognized by default so you will have to set the type of files to "All Files (*.*)".

4) Once the file is open, Click on the "View" drop-down menu, and in the Codec menu choose "4bpp Linear, Reverse Order".

5) Now just play with the tile rows button until you get something that looks like the sprites you're looking for, like this:



Correcting the Pallets in Tile Molester

1) For the Kirby and Helper files, the pallet data is at the bottom of the file. Scroll down to the very bottom and you should see some junk like this:



(skip to step 8 for the boss files)

2) You will need to find the Hexidecimal cooridinates for the beginning of this chunk of data. To do that, simply mess with the column/row buttons and adjust it so that the first block of this "junk" data is in the upper-left corner. Then look at the bottom of the screen and you will see the hexidecimal coordiantes in the location circled below:



3) Now you need to convert this hex number to decimal. To do this, simply go to Google.com and type "0x***** in decimal" in the search box, where the asterisks are the number you just got off of Tile Molester. Example.

4) Go back to Tile Molester and go to the drop-down menus and choose Pallet > Import From > This File.

5) In the next window, set the "offset" to the number you just got from the Google calculation (removing any spaces from the number). Set the "size" to 512. The "format" should be "15bpp RGB (555)" (If this does not appear as an option you didn't download and replace that xml file like I told you to).

6) When you click okay, the screen should hopefully change colors. If it doesn't, it's because the number for Size was set to large for this file. Go back to Pallet > Import From > This File and cut the number for "size" in half (i.e. 512 becomes 256). If it still doesn't change, keep cutting the number in half until it does.

7) When the color does change, the pallet might still not be what it's supposed to be. Go to the pallet box at the bottom of the screen and click on the Right arrow and it should eventually change to what you want.



8) The boss files are a bit different. Their pallets appear at the beginning of their files instead of at the end. The trick here is trying to figure out exactly where the pallet file begins because it follows a bunch of other junk data and can be hard to spot. Watch for a spot where the random colored pixels get tight-knit and there is lesser black pixels. This is most likely the beginning of the pallet data. Once you have the starting spot figured out, do the rest just like you would the helper/kirby files.