Help:Contents/Finding Content/Finding graphics

To do: Graphics viewers for consoles such as the Wii U/PS2 should be put in Help:Contents/Finding_Content/Systems instead?

For older games, you're going to need a tile viewer or a texture finder for this. Newer games, in contrast, have a variety of ways to find new textures.

Methods of extraction for "2D" games

Games that predominantly use sprites, index palettes, "2D" graphics, etc.

ROM

Uncompressed

You'll need a tile viewer, like Tile Layer (Pro), FaTILEty or Tile Molester. Open the ROM with it, and you'll see a ton of tiles with garbled graphics inside. Just scroll down and, if the graphics are uncompressed, you should see some tiles that look like they could form a decent image. The program should have a small section where you can place these tiles freely.

Try your best to organize them and you should come up with a finished sprite. Afterward, find the appropriate palette for the sprite through either an emulator's tile viewer or through hex editing. Now just find out if it's unused or not.

Compressed

Compressed graphics are usually more difficult to rip, since a game can utilize a unique compression scheme. In some cases, games will utilize common compression formats such as run length encoded data. One example of a program that can decompress tiles is Nemesis MD Programs, which can decompress formats used by many Sega-made (and a few early third-party) Genesis games (such as the Sonic games), including the RLE-based Kosinski and Enigma formats.

In other cases, this can be as far as creating a decompression program based off the disassembled code's decompression routines. Once the sprites are decompressed, try to see if the graphics are referenced within its code or if the code to show them has been disabled.

VRAM

Provided the emulator you're using actually has a function to view patterns, you will find this process easier. Just open up the pattern viewer window and look at what graphics are loaded into memory. Remember to check in several circumstances, like different levels, because the game doesn't load graphics for level 2 while in level 1, for instance. Though remember that some unused graphics might not even be loaded to begin with.

This is how Sonic and Mario were found in Mega Turrican.

You can also open a save state in a tile viewer, although you may need to use some offset to display the tiles correctly. This can be useful if no pattern viewer is available and the graphics are compressed in the ROM.

File extraction

Begin by using a file extraction program and search for common file formats such as .png, .dss, or .jpeg. If that doesn't work, try to see if there is a header of sorts hidden within the game. Also, for iOS games, a converter is needed in order for the .png files to be viewed correctly on the wiki.

Methods of extraction for "3D" games

Games that predominantly use 3D geometry etc.

ROM

Simply put, you'll have to find a program that can open the files that have the textures and sprites. Maybe the files use common extensions. For instance, Sonic Heroes' texture files have the same format as GTA III's.

VRAM

This is a bit complex, and a bit platform-dependent. The basic idea is that there are ways to view which textures are loaded into memory.

PC

See Texture rippers for more information.

One way to access the texture memory for a PC game that uses DirectX, would be to use Cheat Engine. Using DirectX-mess, which is absent in version 6 of CE (D3D hook in newer versions should enable the same functionality).

Emulators

Some emulators have functions that allow texture-ripping, like Dolphin and Project64, for instance.

File extraction

Begin by using a file extraction program and search for common file formats such as .png, .dss, or .jpeg. If that doesn't work, try to see if there is a header of sorts hidden within the game. Also, for iOS games, a converter is needed in order for the .png files to be viewed correctly on the wiki.

Graphics viewers

These are some of the tools that can be used for viewing graphics in most games:

General

• XnView / XnViewMP
  Views a variety of graphics formats. Useful for viewing/ripping .LBM files, which are used in lots of Amiga games and some MS-DOS games.
• PixelDbg
  Allows you to view any type of file as image data, using a number of different formats. Tutorial can be found here.
• binxelview
  View uncompressed visual data in a grid, with many more formats than PixelDbg, but with a 256 MB file limit.
• GIMP
  Allows loading image from raw data (Select File then Open, and select Raw image data).
• TextureFinder 1.3.2
  Similar to PixelDbg, but more limited (no custom palettes). Requires that the file be uncompressed.
• Mumm-Ra's Game Graphics Tool
  Very similar to PixelDbg.

Atari/Amiga/C64

• 2600gfx (not sure if this is the original home page; scroll down to see it)
  Extracts graphics from Atari 2600 ROMs somehow.
• gimp-cbmplugs (by Debian project member David Weinehall; distributed as a package in many Linux distributions but does not appear to have its own home page)
  Plugin for GIMP that supports loading some Commodore 64 image files.
• Maptapper
  Designed to look through Amiga games for both graphics and maps. It can also work for Atari ST games and has preliminary support for C64 games.

PlayStation 1/2/PSP

• jPSXdec
  Cross-platform PlayStation 1 media reader, decoder, and converter. Good for audio, video and image/graphic files.
• Console Texture Explorer
  Allows working with PSP and PS2 textures. It helps to minimize manual work during texture resources manual scanning and graphics data research in raw archives.
• Rainbow
  Full TIM2 support (PS2/PSP). TPL and NUT files can only be viewed.
• PVV (PlayStation VRAM Viewer)
  Decode, view and save the contents of the Video RAM generated by Playstation 1 emulators. (Alternatively it can also process raw binary graphics data.) It currently supports ePSXe, PCSX 1.5, PCSX 1.9 and pSX savestates.

Wii/Wii U

• BrawlBox/BrawlCrate
  Multipurpose
• CTools
  
• Wiimms SZS Tools
  Modify BREFT, BTI, TEX0, TPL and .png images
• Wexos's Toolbox
  Loads plugins to be able to edit files, supports many formats.
• List of Wii U PC utilities - GBA Temp

3DS

• List of 3DS PC utilities - GBA Temp

Switch

• List of Switch PC utilities - GBA Temp

Tile viewers

To view tiles in games, some tools to use are:

• YY-CHR
  Very complex editor

• Tile Layer Pro
  Supports NES, Game Boy (including Advance), Genesis, among other formats. It's comparatively basic, with no tile shifting.

• Tile Molester
  Poor N64 texture ripping support, due to a lack of RGBA transparency support.

• Sonic Molester
  A specialized version of Tile Molester, with several additional features intended for graphic editing purposes.

• FaTILEty
  Best suited for 16-bit games or older

• GGD

• TiledGGD
  GGD with several additional features, like support for tiled graphics

• Tile Eater

• Scrubby
  A Mac OS X tile editor with support for SNES, NES, and Game Boy games.

• Djinn Tile Mapper
  Can read hex map data with the game's native tile format, provided that the tiles are uncompressed.

• DirectEd

• Infontile

• Ultimate Tile Editor

• TilEd 2002

• Tilem

• PVV
  Designed to look what is loaded into the PlayStation's VRAM generated from PlayStation emulators.

Emulators with pattern viewers

NES

• FCEUX
  A pattern viewer is accessible by selecting "PPU Viewer" under "Debug" on the menu bar. Right-clicking on the pattern tables changes the palette.

SNES

• vSNES

Sega 8-bit

• Emukon

  A tile viewer is built in that can view tiles in either a 8*8 or a 16*8 format

Arcade

• MAME

  While playing a game, press F4 to see a palette screen. Then, press Enter to switch between the palette, pattern, and tilemap viewers. Pressing + or - increases and reduces the size of the entries. Pressing Up and Down on the keyboard goes through the entries, while Left and Right changes the palette. Pressing {/[ and }/] goes through the banks.
  
  Please note this feature will not work fully on all games: For instance, Mortal Kombat doesn't use a tile-based system, so only the palette screen can be viewed.

• Kawaks

  While playing a CPS1, CPS2, or Neo Geo game, select tileviewer under Tools to find the graphics you're looking for. Please make sure you find the right palette for the graphics. There are three or two type of tile size: 8x8 is for the smaller text and other small things, 16x16 is where the characters sprites, props and larger texts are. And 32x32 is for the backgrounds. Be sure to take a screenshot of it while pausing the game through the emulator.

Genesis

• Genecyst

• Gens (and several of its forks)
  Under CPU on the menu bar, select Debug, then Genesis - VDP, Sega CD - GFX, or 32X - VDP to see a pattern viewer with palette selection and sprite control features. Note that this heavily relies on a numeric keypad. On computers lacking this, enable an on-screen keyboard program with support for numeric keypad input (ex. the one bundled with Windows 7).

Key	Action
Num. Pad - and +	Scroll through the pattern viewer (- goes up, while + goes down)
Num. Pad *	Change the palette (cycles between normal, shadow, highlight, and an unknown fourth setting every four palette lines)
Space / Z	Toggles debug mode.
X	Shows/hides the current game frame.

Game Boy Advance

• Visual Boy Advance

  Under Tools on the menu bar, there are a few ways one can rip graphics from a video game. A tile viewer is present, allowing the player to see what is loaded at a particular moment. The OAM viewer can also be helpful, as it allows players to see fully assembled sprites.

Nintendo DS

• DeSmuMe
  Has a built-in tile viewer that can view the various layers of the NDS
• Tinke
  A DS ROM viewer for 2D graphics, but it can open also 3D models, and some sound and text files.

Texture rippers

To rip textures from games, some tools to use are:

Cheat Engine

Note: Versions after 6.X don't support Direct X-Mess. D3D hook should be functionally similar

To rip textures off of Direct-X games with Cheat Engine, start the program, and go down to Advanced Options. Then click on Direct X-Mess. Choose the game, specify the parameters, if any, press Ok, and finally start the game by pressing Ok.

On the window that was opened, navigate down to the "Textures" section. Click on the text box there and choose a key (combination) of your liking, like Backspace. Press Apply in the bottom right corner. In-game, play until you want the textures ripped and press the assigned key. The game should freeze for a second. Then, navigate to where the game's executable is, and you should see several .bmp files, following the format "CETEX*.bmp".

If you don't want to dump all textures into the disk, you can alternately see miniatures of the loaded textures in-game. On the DirectX Settings dialog, go down into the "Aimhelper functions" section, and search for "Previous texture" and "Next texture". Map these 2 functions to some buttons, and, in-game, press these buttons to navigate through the list of loaded textures. "Lock/Unlock Texture" can also be used to highlight the texture in the model's geometry, in case you're having trouble figuring out if it's used or not.

bmdview2

Bmdview2 allows you to not only look at BMD/BDL models within GameCube and Wii games, but also allows you to rip textures directly off of models. Textures that are ripped off in this manner appear as files with a DDS format. You can open these files for viewing by using a program called ddsview.

Ninja Ripper

Ninja Ripper allows ripping of textures & models from the memory of Windows games that use DirectX 12/11/9/8/7 and is more flexible than 3D Ripper DX. Version 2.0 has better ripping, and incorporates dgVoodoo2 for DirectX 8 and below.

3D Ripper DX

3D Ripper DX lets you rip textures & models from the loaded memory of Windows games that use DirectX 6.x, 8.x and 9.x. Only captures assets loaded in memory, not files.

Adobe and MacroMedia

Director Cast Ripper

DirectorCastRipper rips assets from files that are used with Macromedia Director, Shockwave movies and casts.

ProjectorRays Shockwave Decompiler converts published and or protected Shockwave movies and casts to a readable format made by Macromedia Director.

JPEXS Flash Decompiler

JPEXS Flash Decompiler is a Flash SWF decompiler and editor. Extract resources, convert SWF to FLA, edit ActionScript, replace images, sounds, texts and fonts. Various output formats available.

Model Viewers

General

• Blender
  Free, open-source 3D modelling program, with a large community. Community plugins allow for custom file formats.
• MilkShape 3D
  Supports 70 different file formats, has a skeletal animator, and basic modelling operations.
• Noesis
  Previewing and converting between hundreds of model, image, and animation formats, features plugin support. Durik256 has made some free plugins (and paid ones).

Unreal Engine

• UE Viewer
  This free graphic viewer application software, Umodel, helps you find, view and export 3D models and textures from games made with Epic Games' Unreal Engine.