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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 YY-CHR to rip SNES games.
First of all you'll need the tools to rip your sprites. For this tutorial you can't use any random emulator, since YY-CHR only uses savestates of one particular emulator, called ZSNES. People often don't use ZSNES because it's a horrible emulator, but unfortunately it's the only emulator supported. You can find YY-CHR and ZSNES here:
Okay, let's load up a game with ZSNES. I myself use a game which I had been playing in the past quite a lot, called Mickey Mania. I've never managed to finish the game, not even with Game Genie. Anyway, let's load up the game, any game you want. Well, not any game, some games are compressed to fit in more graphics, like Super Mario World. These games need some decompression, which differs per game.
Once we load up the game, let's find a good moment to make a savestate. Remember, you must make the savestate where you can find the object you want to rip. We'll be using the palette used there. I'll use the part in the intro where you can find both Mickey and Pluto.
When we finally arrive at the point where we find that frame, we make the savestate. This can be done by pressing F2 or choosing it from the menu (see illustration 1). When that's done you should see a message saying the savestate has been saved. Now it's time to load up YY-CHR. From here, we should just load up the ROM (in my case Mickey Mania). It's often a SMC file, if you can't see the extension you can enable it in the Map Options of Windows. Anyway, when you load up the ROM on the left you might find some strange 'noise' (see illustration 2). This is the ROM data, which you don't really need. What you need are the actual sprites. But before we start searching we need to get the right palette. This is where the savestate comes in handy. Just load up the savestate. This can be done in three ways. First way is pressing the last button below the menu, the one with the console on it. Second way is pressing F12, and the last way is by choosing Palette > Emulator state load... Then choose the savestate, which has practically the same name as the ROM, and you're done! You have your palette.
Okay, palette is fine, but it's useless if you don't know which colour belongs to where. This is where the importing from savestate comes in handy. The palette automatically gets sorted in such a way that you don't have to alter anything, other than the colour set. The colour sets each contain sixteen of the palette colours. You can cycle trough them using the up and down arrows right from the main palette. However, you might notice two things. First is that there is an aditional palette bar which cycles with the palette, but most probably differently, and second is that you cannot access all the colours at once. This is because the aditional bar is actually the bar which picks the colours for you, for the colour set. There are also two rows of them, which allow you to get the other colours as well. So, try search for the sprites you wanted to rip and cycle trough the palette until you get the right colours for the sprite.
Now usually all is fine, you can start your ripping experience. But sometimes the sprites get all freaky, they for example get pushed a byte. This means that you might encounter strange lines through your sprites (see illustration 3). To solve this, just use the + or - buttons to re-align them. You know when they're right. This also most probably has to be done every few sprites. Now to save them, you don't need to make seperate screenshots for each sprite. You can easily save them by pressing the F9 button or to go to File > Take Snapshot.
After this, there is just one thing to do, and that is to re-assemble them. Just open up every file you just created, and start taking each usable 8x8 tile apart. They are often stored chronologically from left to right, from top to bottom. But there are moments that this is not the case. However, most are ordened in a way that you can see which tile belongs to which (see illustration 4). You can also use some preset ordening patterns, which you can find in the lower left menu list. They can help a lot.
Directly ripping the sprites from the ROM is more effective than using emulators, as you always get them the way they are meant to be, without special effects. But be sure that the background colour isn't used twice in the palette, as was the case in Mickey Mania, where black occurred twice. To solve it, I changed the background colour to a different, unused color. This can be done by right-clicking on the colour you want to change and change the colour bars.
This tutorial is mostly written for SNES games, but can also be used for other games as well. However, certain games do require some more, and you will learn about them another time.
