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Topic: Tutorial for Tile Molester? (Read 2 times)
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HollyGU
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« on: September 13, 2008, 01:44:29 am » |
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Alright suprisingly the text was so easy to edit, but i don't really understand tile molester, i found one tutorial but all it does is explain the buttons etc which isn't that useful for me seeing as i know what all the basic buttons do. All i seem to beable to get is messy garbage even if it's a .nds or .gba, i change the codec, nothing, i change the block size, NOTHING, if anyone knows of a good tutorial or has the time to explain i would appreciate it  |
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Ryusui
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« Reply #1 on: September 13, 2008, 01:53:05 am » |
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You won't see graphics the instant you open the ROM. You'll need to scroll down and search the ROM thoroughly. Tile Molester will automatically switch to the proper codec if it recognizes the file extension, but in some cases you'll need to change it manually. A lot of DS games store their graphical data in GBA format, for example, which is "4bpp linear, reverse-order". SNES games also sometimes store fonts in Game Boy format, which is "2bpp planar".
There's also the off chance the graphics are compressed, which means Tile Molester can't help you. You'll need some programming skills in order to handle compression.
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HollyGU
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« Reply #2 on: September 13, 2008, 01:55:45 am » |
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I'm still trying to figure out how darth had the rabbits looking all neat n' stuff, looks like it might be easier to edit the .nds rom after all
Edit: I got too the point where i was starting to beable to make out stuff in the .gba file but it was all inverted.
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Ryusui
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« Reply #3 on: September 13, 2008, 02:32:24 am » |
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"Inverted"? As in, flipped? Reversed? It might be that the tile alignment was off.
And it's not easier to "edit the .nds ROM". You're dealing with the same stuff, just all jammed together into one contiguous lump. And the fact that the files are not guaranteed to begin and end at nice even multiples of the tile size probably compounds things.
As for the Harvest Moon graphics, did you try fine-tuning the alignment with the plus key (which increments the offset one byte at a time)?
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DarthNemesis
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« Reply #4 on: September 13, 2008, 02:55:34 am » |
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As for the Harvest Moon graphics, did you try fine-tuning the alignment with the plus key (which increments the offset one byte at a time)?
This is exactly what I did. Also, The palette section starts at 415172, so try importing from different 32-byte increments after that to see more sprites. |
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HollyGU
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« Reply #5 on: September 13, 2008, 03:12:36 am » |
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Yay i finally got the rabbit i used 415172 instead of 415364 they look quite good, finally another thing i understand lol, one thing that i'm wondering how do you know which palette to use?
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sb iq
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« Reply #6 on: September 13, 2008, 03:19:33 am » |
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You gotta rip it out of the game and somehow convert it into a .ZST savestate.
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DarthNemesis
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« Reply #7 on: September 13, 2008, 03:53:51 am » |
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Yay i finally got the rabbit i used 415172 instead of 415364 they look quite good, finally another thing i understand lol, one thing that i'm wondering how do you know which palette to use?
Trial and error, unless you want to try and figure out the block of data at the beginning of each set of images. You gotta rip it out of the game and somehow convert it into a .ZST savestate.
...what? |
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Ryusui
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« Reply #8 on: September 13, 2008, 04:33:34 am » |
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Yay i finally got the rabbit i used 415172 instead of 415364 they look quite good, finally another thing i understand lol, one thing that i'm wondering how do you know which palette to use?
Trial and error, unless you want to try and figure out the block of data at the beginning of each set of images. Which isn't too hard, truth be told, once you develop a knack for it. Open up the file in Tile Molester and see if anything shows up as gibberish - absolute gibberish, no matter how you try to fine-tune the image offset. There should be a great big chunk of it at the top of the file, or possibly at the end. Somewhere in that gibberish is your palette information. An easy way to figure it out - if your emulator has a palette viewer, that is - is to find out which palette the sprites you're looking at use, find the bytes in CGRAM that correspond to that palette, and just hex search for 'em. This trick works with just about anything: run the game, find the data, then hex search for it in the ROM. Easy. You gotta rip it out of the game and somehow convert it into a .ZST savestate.
...what? Yeah, uh...apparently someone hasn't caught that we're working with GBA and DS games here. Still, similar principles apply. A .ZST is a ZSNES savestate; the format has changed over time, but since it's well-documented, there are many tools that let you open up a .ZST and poke around the contents of the SNES' memory at the instant the file was saved. Emulators such as VBA and NO$GBA let you cut out the middlemen endemic to SNES hacking and view memory directly: GBA and DS hacking is actually in some ways easier than SNES hacking. |
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HollyGU
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« Reply #9 on: September 13, 2008, 04:57:39 am » |
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Well I think I'm getting the hang of this now, I've put together Rabbits, Squirrels, Bee's, dragon flies etc, so now I'm wondering, in each .bin file like animal.bin girl.bin etc, is there a different palette for each file? If so how would i go about finding out the palette? Because i tried using the same palette 415172 for girl.bin and it was complete garbage with inverted colours etc, I'm i understanding this right so far?
Edit: Also is there multiple different palettes for one .bin file? A lot of the stuff looks normal just not in the right place, but some things look really weird.
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« Last Edit: September 13, 2008, 05:05:57 am by HollyGU »
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Ryusui
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« Reply #10 on: September 13, 2008, 01:35:45 pm » |
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It's entirely possible. The two offsets you gave differ by 192; did you try using the offset DarthNemesis gave to view the "weird" stuff?
On a side note, if you do discover a palette using WindHex, note that one of Tile Molester's many little quibbles is that in some places - like the palette import system - the program accepts decimal offsets instead of hexadecimal ones. You can convert hex to decimal and back using Windows Calculator: go to the View menu and select Scientific, and everything you need will appear.
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DarthNemesis
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« Reply #11 on: September 13, 2008, 02:22:06 pm » |
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Well I think I'm getting the hang of this now, I've put together Rabbits, Squirrels, Bee's, dragon flies etc, so now I'm wondering, in each .bin file like animal.bin girl.bin etc, is there a different palette for each file? If so how would i go about finding out the palette? Because i tried using the same palette 415172 for girl.bin and it was complete garbage with inverted colours etc, I'm i understanding this right so far? The palette was simply at the end of the file. As for girl.bin, you can see shapes using the 4bpp linear reverse-order codec, but I don't know where the palette is. Edit: Also is there multiple different palettes for one .bin file? A lot of the stuff looks normal just not in the right place, but some things look really weird.
Yes there are, which is why I suggested trying different offsets. |
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Spikeman
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« Reply #12 on: September 13, 2008, 06:57:46 pm » |
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For a "tutorial" how about reading the help file? It explains everything the program can do in pretty basic terms.  |
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InVerse
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« Reply #13 on: September 13, 2008, 07:59:52 pm » |
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For a "tutorial" how about reading the help file? It explains everything the program can do in pretty basic terms. Whenever I click Help -> Help Topics (or hit F1) I just get the wait error and then nothing. For a long time, I figured there was no Help file, that SnowBro just created the menu with the intent of adding it later. It wasn't too very long ago that I happened to look through the Tile Molester directory and notice the Docs folder and the help file contained therein. However, the included documentation gives a pretty good technical explanation which is fine for people that already know what they're doing, but I can see where a new hacker would benefit from some more hands on demonstrations. |
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HollyGU
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« Reply #14 on: September 13, 2008, 10:36:25 pm » |
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Yeah i had that problem as well, the help file wouldn't load, so i figured there wasn't one yet. But yeah i just checked docs and it's there. Even still i appreciate the help I've received so far. ^^
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