Odds are it's compressed. Sorry.

If there's one thing that's most likely to be compressed in a game, it's the title screen. Big graphic, displayed only once, performance not really an issue...

Just an FYI, Sylvanian Melodies for GBC uses a metric buttload of compression. Thankfully, I wrote a nice app that rips all the graphics and reinserts them just dandy. ^_^

Well, compression is actually pretty easy to tackle. You typically need some ASM knowhow to handle compression, but you don't need to do any real hacking: to start with, you just need to figure out how the game does what it does, and then replicate it in a programming language like C++ or Visual Basic.

Most games use a variation on LZ: RHDN has a doc on compression which explains it nicely. In a nutshell, an LZ code is broken up into two types of byte group: "plaintext" and compression data. "Plaintext" is copied into the output buffer (wherever in memory it may be) as-is; compression data is an instruction to copy a number of bytes from a previous position.

For example, if you applied LZ compression to the sentence "In all your journeys, have you seen", the second instance of " you" (space included) could be replaced with an instruction that copies the identical previous sequence (right after "all").

The second half of tackling compression is a bit tougher, and takes a bit more programming prowess. Writing a decompressor is easy: just write a program that does exactly what the original ASM does. Writing a compressor is hard, because while you have the compression format, you don't have a blueprint for generating it from an uncompressed file. It takes trial, error and a bit of intuition, not to mention a hell of a lot more time than it takes to make a decompressor...but it's possible in every case. (I've even written compatible compressors that achieve a slightly higher compression ratio than the originals.)

Too bad! I ask! No just kidding lol. But I do suggest doing a little bit more to it just to say rawr I did more then just hack the title screen! lol.