Quote:
Originally Posted by hitchhikr
I had a look but in newer mame they changed the way to visualize the tiles: they only decode the ones that are currently viewed.
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Ah, that's too bad. I really like to have the big image, but as long as I have your version, I'm safe
Alright, thanks. I was playing around with the format by myself and found out how to read the old palette format, but it's still very awesome that you made an update!
The reason I find your mod so helpful is that I am currently writing a tool that allows to create sprites from discrete 8x8 or 16x16 tiles based on the image your mod creates. This would theoretically allow to fairly quickly extract all the sprites including their animations without having to faff about with manual screengrabs or pixel-precise sprite cutouts. I dream of having a complete archive of all the old arcade game sprites, and since the lexicon is pretty patchy at the moment, I figured the only way to achieve this is by offering better tooling to the rippers.
One peculiarity about MAME games is giving me a headache though, and that is that each sprite seems to get assigned their own private palette from the set of available palettes which can easily range in the dozens. As you wrote, it does not seem to be possible to make the assignment from palette to sprite automatically, but I would at least like to give my tool a function that allows assigning each extracted sprite one of the available palettes manually.
I don't know if you see any merit in this but in order to do that, I would need two changes to your mod:
1) Save the sprite sheets as an indexed bmp instead of a RGB one. That way, I could just pick one of the sprite sheets and switch out the palette to get all the other sprite sheets. If possible, it would really help if the indices are compatible with all the palettes, e.g. a limited palette with only 4 colors will likely only save 4 pixel indices, whereas a larger palette would write more. So using the original sprite sheet indices would be very helpful here.
2) Instead of writing just the current palette, write all the palettes, which I would assume should be possible, since you already seem to apply all possible palettes when you write the sprite sheets currently.
Not sure you have the time for this or find this useful, though. Writing the sprite sheet as indexed would also reduce the file size to 1/3 according to a manual conversion I did as a test. So it may be a good improvement regardless of what I plan to do with the images.
If this plan failed, I could probably create what I need from the images your current mod produces, but if I wanted to release my tool if it gets finished, I wanted to make it as simple as possible for the users without having to run additional python scripts to set up everything. Ideally a user would be able to extract just a single sprite sheet image and a large bunch of palettes (instead of a lot of different images).
In any case, the current version of your mod is already a tremendous help for ripping sprites, especially once I get the palette thing to work. Thanks again for putting it out there.