nesdev.org

does snes have a common image format?

are there tools to dump all backgrounds and sprites of a rom?

if not, how would i go about getting all the images from a super mario world rom.

SNES graphics works with tiles.
You should look into tile editors, such as YY-CHR or Tile Layer.

Many SNES games have compressed graphics though, so you won't see them with those unfortunately.

counterp wrote:does snes have a common image format?

Depends on what you mean. Game graphics are made of several 8x8 blocks/tiles put together, and the format for these tiles is constant (at least when in use by the video hardware, when stored in the ROM they can be compressed, and the exact format used will vary from game to game).

are there tools to dump all backgrounds and sprites of a rom?

I doubt it, unless these tools are game specific. That's because even though the format for the 8x8 tiles follows a standard, in order to build the images we see on the screen a lot more information is needed: which palettes these tiles must use, where in the screen each one goes, etc, and there is no standard for that kind of information.

if not, how would i go about getting all the images from a super mario world rom.

What exactly do you want to do? When you say all the "images" do you mean all the individual blocks so that you can build your own maps (for example) or do you mean complete level maps?

If you're willing to work with proprietary software on Windows, you can play with Lunar Magic, which has "a lot more information" built into it and can export a lot of this.

doesn't SNES use planar GFX setup ?

On MD, each byte of VRAM contains 2 pixels, 4 bits for one pixel. In planar setup you got one pixel spread across bytes. So if a pixel needs 4 bits you got the pixel spread between 4 bytes... ?

Yes. Byte0 holds bit0 for row0, byte1 holds bit1 for row0, byte2 holds bit0 for row1, and so on down to byte15. Then byte16 and on continues with bit2/bit3 (if needed), all the way up to the necessary number of bits for the currently used map type.

A 16-color tile on Super NES is 32 bytes long and looks like two Game Boy tiles one after another. The pixel rows start on bytes 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, and 14. The bit planes for one "sliver" of 8x1 pixels are at offsets 17, 16, 1, and 0 from the start of the rows. The number made from the most significant bits of all these bytes determines the color index pixel on the left side; the number made from the least significant bits determines the color index of the pixel on the right side.

I *think* 4-color tiles are the same as Game Boy tiles, or the same as the first 16 bytes of a 16-color tile.

Mode 7 tiles are packed pixels.

Fixed bit-rate compression typically reduces the number of colors available to each tile. Super Mario World assumes plane 3 is either all zeroes or equal to planes 0-2 OR'd together, so that a single tile uses colors 0-7 or 0 and 9-15. The Mode 7 tiles in F-Zero look like Genesis tiles (4-bit packed MSB-first) with a little header that apparently controls which colors are used.

Variable bit-rate compression most often uses either "Lempel-Ziv" family techniques, in which runs of bytes are copied from earlier in the decompressed data (of which RLE is a special case), or "Huffman" family techniques, which assign shorter bit codes to more common bytes and longer codes to less common ones, or both.

What I want to do is dump all sprites + maps, didn't realize it was all split up in 8x8 tiles

And i just downloaded lunar magic, checking it out.

counterp wrote:didn't realize it was all split up in 8x8 tiles

All old games (and new 2D games too, and even 3D games reuse textures and polygons) draw their maps by reusing the same blocks over and over and over again... It's a form of image compression actually. The same kind of grass shows up over and over, the same "?" blocks, the same clouds... everything repeats, so it makes sense to have a few tiles representing those objects and a tile map where you can place those tiles, and reuse the same ones as much as you like. It's a much more compact way to represent graphics, and fits perfectly the kinds of games from the 80's and 90's.

Lunar magic is working wonders, thanks.