Trying to figure out how to rip a specific menu element

[WitchRolina]

So...



See that top left image?  I'm trying to get that, but clean.  No text, no images, just that lovely detailed background thingy.  Thing is, I'm kind of a noob at this, so I'd like to hear y'alls thoughts as to what tools I should use to get it - which DS emulator, what ripping tools, etc.  I may need a little guidance after that, so if after getting the advice on the tools I still need some help figuring it out, I'll make a mention.

Please take note that this is not a ripping request - I want to learn how to get it myself, rather than have someone get it for me.

[puggsoy]

First off, just as a tip, it's always good to mention the name of the game, whether you're requesting or just asking for help. It just gives us an idea of what we're working with, like maybe someone knows a super simple way of ripping from this particular game. After a quick Google though I found that it's Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, so no worries.

Now, there are 2 common ways you could try ripping this; extracting the images from the ROM directly, or hard-ripping.

The first option is usually the ideal way of doing it, since you'll get clean rips as they're stored in the game. For DS games the most used program is Tinke. Look around in the file structure, you might find some formats it recognises that you can extract. If not, you can try Googling or asking around for information on the files you do find.

The other way is hard ripping. This includes playing the game in an emulator until the graphics appear on-screen, taking a screenshot, and removing the unnecessary stuff. Of course this is incredibly difficult (and often impossible when stuff is on top of each other) unless you have an emulator that can disable layers. The most popular one for this is DeSmuME. If you disable all layers except for the one with your sprites, you should hopefully be able to take a screenshot from which you can easily obtain your sprite. It does depend though, some games use layers in an inconvenient way.

The first case is usually something you'd try first, hard-ripping is often used as a last resort, or if it's easier to do it that way. Sometimes it's just too tedious or nigh impossible to do though (especially when trying to rip character sprites with lots of effects or something). In that case there are some more advanced methods you can try if you're determined enough (tile ripping, trying to convert/extract unknown formats, etc). With luck that shouldn't be necessary in this case.

Hopefully that should get you started. Feel free to ask if you need any help

[WitchRolina]

Holy carp, I can't make heads or tails of this... Off chance there's a video walkthrough y'all link newbies to? I get like, twenty things that aren't this when I try to look it up. Blasted program doesn't even have a readme... There's a metric crapton of .bin files in the thing. One sec, lemme get a screenshot:



All I really seem to be able to do is expand the folders to look in them, as well as extract .narc files so they expand out too... I feel like there's some step I'm missing or perhaps a feature I haven't come across in my fiddling. :/


Edit: I've extracted the data folder to my HDD in case the next thing I need to do is convert the .bin and .dat files I found or something, so there's that I suppose...
Edit2: Fiddling around with the "open as", I can get the palettes of stuff, but not much else. Beit icons or other assets, opening as Tile and Map just makes it look like a long chain of palettes. Don't really see an option for opening as other types of image formats...

[puggsoy]

There isn't really a video tutorial or anything, you should hopefully get the hang of it pretty quickly. I mean you've more or less got it, it's just unfortunate that this game in particular is bothersome.

If you're getting .bins and .dats that's pretty much a guarantee that it's a unique format, those extensions are super common and generic (binary and data). The best thing you can really do is upload a couple of those, I can look into them and if you're lucky they're not outrageously encrypted or complex. Looking at the file names they seem to be individual images, so fingers crossed.

If that doesn't work then you might have to go and hard-rip it. For the menu icons this should be relatively easy, since they won't be moving around a lot and most likely have one or two frames which you can probably control.

[WitchRolina]

Awww, bollocks.  Just my luck - the game I wanna get stuff from is the problem child of the bunch.  I've uploaded the folder I'm eyeing to Mega (.bin files aren't okay to attach, so...), I figure try to work your magic on a few of those, and if it works tell me how you did it so I can work on the other assets. Otherwise... I get to have fun times with figuring out how to do stuff like save data and other pains in the butt that I know this game has a problem with. Like running at normal speed.

Oh, while I'm at it, off chance you know how to convert the fonts in the game into usable fonts for the computer?  The data for that is readable just fine, albeit with a different program.

Mega link to the folder is here: https://mega.co.nz/#F!s1kCyRII!16HFcUxF3LPOSWTFSDDfcQ

[puggsoy]

Yeah, these are weird... I tried a couple of things but I'm out of ideas. Maybe someone else can help, but at this point I think it might be best to try hard ripping. Sorry!

As for the fonts, again if you could upload some of those I can take a look. If you want to attach files, putting them in a zip will work, but uploading to Mega is fine too.

[WitchRolina]

Fonts can be found here:

https://mega.co.nz/#F!V49ykKKL!R4_Q6bLhA8IqUq4l8rGx3w

I know them to be NFTR fonts, so there's this that'll work with them: https://gbatemp.net/threads/nftr-editor.105060/

Alternatively, using the Rom itself to snag them might work - the filepath is Root → Data → Fonts.

I've searched for these in the past, which is how I know how to get them - but the actual act of creating a usable font is something that's beyond me.

[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.

[WitchRolina]

Well, for my purposes, I need them in the size they come in. Thanks for those tools, and the advice. I'll get to work on this right away~

Hopefully, I'll be able to grab all the other menu elements as well. It may be a bit, what with all the holidays in the way and what not, but I'll report my progress as I make it. Thanks again for your help~

[puggsoy]

Glad I could help, it was pretty fun