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When people 'rip' sprites they actually screen-capture them, often removing layers and such. While this is an effective way, it's often time-consuming. It could get faster, if you use tools. In this tutorial we will use Tile Molester to rip Nintendo 64 games.
First of all I need to say that ripping N64 sprites using Tile Molester isn't always effective. Most of the time you'll end up frustrated, because you just can't find the sprite you want. But this is often the fastest way. Tile Molester also has another 'disadvantage', in that it uses the JRE (Java Runtime Environment). To actually download the JRE you'll need to go to the main site, since they often don't allow hotlinking, but seeing as you don't often know what to download, I'll guide you trough it. This isn't needed if you have the right version of the JRE, which is 1.4.0 or higher. Also, since the site of Tile Molester doesn't exist anymore, I'm linking to Zophar.net.
Tile Molester
Java Runtime Environment
To download the JRE, let's click on Download. You will see a menu when you move your mouse over it, but just click on Download. Then click on Java SE. From here everything is pretty streightforward, since it is actually called Java Runtime Environment. If you plan to develop Java applications, you can instead download the JDK version.
Now it's time to open Tile Molester. However... there are no executables or batch files. Only some files and something called tm (or tm.jar if you enabled viewing the extensions of known file formats). Well, if everything is correct you can just double-click on that file. However, since not every computer associate JAR files with Java, this could become a problem. However, this can easily be solved by making a BAT file, and entering this in the file:
java -jar tm.jar
Now let's run Tile Molester. When you first run the program you can choose in which language to run the program. Since most of you don't live in a country featured, just choose English. So, let's open up your ROM. I'm picking a game which most certainly has sprites, which is Paper Mario. Now that we've opened up the program, let's search for the sprite we want to rip. I'll search for the Nintendo 64 logo, to make it simple. Now often you don't need to change anything, since Tile Molester picks the right codec, but sometimes you'll need to pick it yourself. This can be done by going to View > Codec. However, pressing the + or - button on the toolbar (see illustration 1) could also be sufficient enough in most cases.
Now there are a few things which are already discussed in the help documents, but could nontheless be usefull. For example, what if your sprite isn't window-sized, meaning, smaller than the standard 320x240? Or what if it's bigger? If that would occur, the sprite would get stretched, or worse, it could wrap around. There are two sollutions for that. One, you could change the row width of the canvas, using the first or second button on the last group of the toolbar (see illustration 2). This will resize the canvas. The second way is to change the "Block Size". This won't change the canvas, but instead will change the size of the tiles. Remember that each block is 8 by 8 pixels.
