Mame GFX to Amiga
 

Hi any one got any ideas on ripping gfx from MAME and dumping them to the amiga??.

I used to take screen shots of the tile maps, and then load them up (PNG) Snap to IFF, but that was a hassle and didn't really do a proper job.

I then tried AGE, (Arcade Game Editor) But damn it, the damn thing only saves as pcx.

The Arcade gfx roms should be like raw format right ?!?!?.

You could get a PCX datatype for your Amiga and then use Ppaint to load it all (through the datatype)

Some hints at MAME graphics ripping
 

I have had a lot of practice at this and I'm sorry to say but there is no easy solution to this. The main problem is that most arcade boards have palettes for each tile and so you can't easily get at all the graphics. When the game displays them it grabs the correct palette from the colour lookup table and uses that to display the bitmaps.

The only way I've found to rip them is to load the game in MAME, hit F4 and scroll right until you get to the tilemap. Use the arrow keys to change to the palette you think it is and save it. Do that for each part of the graphics you want to rip.

Now go into PPaint and setup a grid (Shift-G) to the same size as the game uses. Most games stick with 16x16 or 8x8 tiles. The bigger the easier! Now you have to cut out each tile, and position it into a new area and be sure to cut out the edges (because when you pickup a block with the grid on, it will grab one extra pixel on each edge). The only tip here is games generally store their graphics in rows then columns.

Here's a quick example of how to rip the sprites from Karnov - the top part is the rip, the green and yellow sections show where I have ripped the sprites from, and the bottom of the screen are the graphics bolted back together. Also note that Karnov is quite an easy one as it has very few colour table entries and uses 16x16 tiles!

Now who wants to code Amiga Karnov? :D

PPaint when it opens these .png images, are they 24 bit, or only 16 colours??. Because I would prefer only 16 colours, as my method saves them to iff as HAM, and it definately lowers the quality.

Er btw: how is that game coming along that you were working on?

I just load the PNG into PPaint (on an A1200) and it will recolour it from 24 bit to 256 colours. Most of the old arcade games only use 16-32 colours anyway so you will not have any reduction in the quality.

The game is coming along nicely :)

Hmm I had trouble changing the sprites of double dragon (just wanted some gfx to play with) back down to 8 colours properly. But when you press F4, sadly it doesn't show all of the gfx which is why AGE was good.

I couldn't get AGE or Turaco/TuracoGL to run properly at all and was most disappointed with them. I checked out double dragon - piece of cake to rip the graphics! Did you hit F4 once the game had actually started? If not, the colour lookup table is not set correctly. Graphics set 1 has most of the sprites and colour entry 0 is the one for player one.

Yes I did hit F4, I always hit F4 on games to see what shows up =].

Colour Entry 1?, is that from the pallete when you first hit F4 or is it from scrolling to Graphics set 1, and it is the default blue palette that shows up? I'm guessing the Second one.

Was having a bit of a play around with PPaint on WinUAE, nice program but a bit to big 7mb for my Real Amiga. I'll leave it on WinUAE.

I mean you have to hit F4 at the right time - the title screen is often not the place to hit F4 if you don't want the title graphics.

PPaint on Aminet maybe 7Mb but you can get away with about 500k total - the main file, a few fonts and settings and that's all you need. I find PPaint works much better on a real Amiga than under emulation - just the keyboard shortcuts seem easier etc.

screen grab using paintshop (or whatever)...

convert to iff (using paintshop)...

create a *virtual* hard-drive using your config (A1200) in winuae (use the folder version not hardfile)

drag pic on the workbench folder in windows

then run winuae... then dpaint AGA

load iff and edit