Hacking Extracting graphics for "Batman: The Brave and the bold"

[Low_Polly]

for the past few days i have been trying to extract graphics from this game with no results so far i've played around with Tinke, Crystaltile2, Tile molester, blender, anim8or none of them yielded any results it doesn't help that theres no information on the file formats contained in this game, i cant even identify where the sprites are, i originally thought that the sprites were in .ANM files but i read that those were just instructions for animations. Here are all the file formats that appear in the game

- .bin (these are named like "arm 7.bin" or "header.bin" but theres another folder called overlay that has files called "Overlay###.bin")

- .sdat and .sfx (i know what these are and have extracted the music and some of the voicelines)

- .an4 and .an8 (these files are named things like "ARMORY_SPRITE_TS.an4" and "INTRO_BATMAN.an8 which leads me to believe these contain some sprites but there isnt enough of them be all the sprites)

- .anm (these are named things like "AQUAMAN.anm" and "AQUAMAN_COMBO.anm")

- .DSFONT (never read anything about these but i assume they're fonts with names like "Arial10_halfsize.dsfont")

- .loctext (these contain all the dialogue and whatnot)

- .manm (these look like animations for boss vehicles like the cat golem or joker's van, named things like "JOKER_VAN.MANM"

- .pal (pretty sure these are palettes)

- .scn (backgrounds? named things like "GOTHAM_ROOFTOP.scn")

- .ts4, .ts8, .typ (??????, named things like "TYPES.typ", "TOUCH_TO_START_BOTTOM.ts8", "CHALLENGE_LEVELS.ts4"

I read that there are files in some games that act as archives and there are programs that can open these archives and get the graphics from it, however none of them were these file types. where can i find the sprites for this game?

 

[FAST6191]

ARM9.bin is the main binary for the game containing the code, ARM7 is usually a helper program in commercial games (so boring you can swap it between games and have things work just fine), overlays are sections of code that get swapped in and out as the game desires (ostensibly as a way of saving memory by only having things when they are needed).

I have seen non code data buried in binaries before.

Rest of those. Fair bet such things are what they are.

I would also note at this point if you are only about ripping things for a sprite sheet or something that you can use the tile viewer of an emulator, possibly with some cheats to speed things up or see things not normally seen.

Anyway with crystaltile2 was able to view a whole bunch of sprites in .anm files, and it could handle the palettes as well with a simple load palette option (right click in the DS window). Said anm files start with a bunch of non graphical aspects which might be what troubled you if you were only double clicking on files. Seen as there are so many aspects of the things in question then pointers or something for them would be a good bet, and if you are lucky maybe a map as well as the shots below (and things I did not bother making a shot of) were a bit of manual fiddling (variously hold shift or ctrl and play with the arrow keys in the tile section) and still had things clearly put together at run time which is common enough (if your have two identical legs then why not save space and mirror them sort of thing, or swap out the legs when running rather than whole new sprite. I would also wonder if TS4 and TS8 refer to the bit depth of the image (the GBA 4bpp, and 8bpp, as in 4 bits per pixel and 8 bits per pixel, 8 bits allowing far more colours but taking up more memory and also having some more restrictions with palettes), the few samples I tried it seemed to hold for.

).

 

[Low_Polly]

ARM9.bin is the main binary for the game containing the code, ARM7 is usually a helper program in commercial games (so boring you can swap it between games and have things work just fine), overlays are sections of code that get swapped in and out as the game desires (ostensibly as a way of saving memory by only having things when they are needed).

I have seen non code data buried in binaries before.

Rest of those. Fair bet such things are what they are.

I would also note at this point if you are only about ripping things for a sprite sheet or something that you can use the tile viewer of an emulator, possibly with some cheats to speed things up or see things not normally seen.

Anyway with crystaltile2 was able to view a whole bunch of sprites in .anm files, and it could handle the palettes as well with a simple load palette option (right click in the DS window). Said anm files start with a bunch of non graphical aspects which might be what troubled you if you were only double clicking on files. Seen as there are so many aspects of the things in question then pointers or something for them would be a good bet, and if you are lucky maybe a map as well as the shots below (and things I did not bother making a shot of) were a bit of manual fiddling (variously hold shift or ctrl and play with the arrow keys in the tile section) and still had things clearly put together at run time which is common enough (if your have two identical legs then why not save space and mirror them sort of thing, or swap out the legs when running rather than whole new sprite. I would also wonder if TS4 and TS8 refer to the bit depth of the image (the GBA 4bpp, and 8bpp, as in 4 bits per pixel and 8 bits per pixel, 8 bits allowing far more colours but taking up more memory and also having some more restrictions with palettes), the few samples I tried it seemed to hold for.View attachment 368654).View attachment 368649View attachment 368648

i was able to view some sprites but i never got any fully aligned properly, My goal is to edit batman's sprite, can i do that in crystaltile or is there another program i can use?

 

[FAST6191]

ctrl and left and right will change the start location by 1 pixel at a time which should eventually align things (it becomes fairly obvious when you do it a few times, though I describe it along the lines of making sure there are not missing rows and nobody ideally starts a tile with a single pixel so get as many as you can in one tile).

You don't need a palette either, just one you can deal with (the thing about tiles being paint by numbers is you are only changing the lookup numbers, not individual pixels which are defined with a colour like in a bitmap image/most conventional editing).

2 main approaches people use for editing in CT2.

1) It does have an onboard editor. It is not as nice as something like tiled2002's one where you can assemble a nice big image in a standalone thing, edit that and shuffle tiles back accordingly but works.
In the menus icons where you swap between hex, assembly and whatnot will be a tile editor window. In this scenario it will be a single tile and I am not sure how to get it to do multiple. If you manage to have it in a format it understands it will be a nice mapped image.
To change colours click on palette (almost invisible in my setup here but I think I have zoom on, can just about see it top left of those images where it says properties) and then you can select various things, char being the standard left click, bg being right click, also where you can export a palette file for GIMP to import if you want to roll that way -- palette viewer tab, right click and import, import from file and fairly obvious from there).

2) CT2 is one of the few things that exports and imports images. On the tile viewer window if you select what you want you can right click, export and something (pick PNG or BMP if it is one of the ones that allowed JPG). Import is just below with the same general idea, does give you the option to place it.
Standard game console pixel art protocols need to be in play here -- limit your palette unless you want to edit that too (GIMP calls its offering here indexed -- click on image, mode, indexed), no gradients, no fuzzy edge brushes unless you are willing to handle the fallout from it. Stick with lossless image formats (again reason for no JPG or such).

Also "edit batman's sprite"... have fun. In addition to the riding a whale one there are a whole bunch of them across a lot of things and lots of them for normal actions and special weapons as well.