[Yensoo]

I posted earlier about vram not working for me with ripping tilesets from suikoden 2 on epsxe. I can get the tiles to show up in vram like so:



But following the tutorial says to use the arrow keys to choose a palette and that doesn't do anything, so I can't change it from the grey.
After that I found another program called PVV that does the same thing and I'm able to choose palettes from the list by clicking on them but the problem is none of the palettes match the game. As you can see here I have them side by side so I can check:



I've tried both 4bpp and 6bpp all over the palette area and none match up, not even for a single tile at a time. Does anyone know how to get the palettes exported properly? Even if I can save out what I have there and put it into photoshop I can choose the palette manually, but I need at least the right palette to pick the colors from. (I could do it by color picking from screenshots of the game itself but that would only work for some tiles. Others are semi transparent in game and therefore wouldn't work. It would also be super tedious.)

Can anyone help me with this?

Other info that might be important:
I'm using epsxe as an emulator.
Saving state, copying save file, renaming to something.7z, extracting and using that extracted file in vram and PVV.
The game is Suikoden 2 and it's a .cue file.
Running windows 8.

[gadesx]

Have you tried use jpsxdec or timviewer first?

[Yensoo]

I don't know a lot about ripping in general. But the rom itself came as a .CUE file and a .BIN file, so Timviewer can't open it. And I'm not sure I'm using it right but jPSXdec doesn't show any image files. There's only a couple audio and movie files and the rest are tons of .BIN, .SDD, .VAB and one .CNF. I'm guessing the images I want are in one of the .BIN parts but I don't know how to "open" them in jPSXdec. Any ideas?

[Dashman]

Open jpsxdec and load the .BIN file of Suikoden II (the "ISO" of the game, basically). The program will look for images inside the whole file. I'm not sure if you can extract TIM files with jpsxdec, but since gadesx was suggesting using timviewer after it, it most probably can.

[BlackDog61]

TextER might work too.
Is there any reason not to mount the bin with Daemon Tools to extract the contents?(I might be suggesting something that doesn't work, here, as I haven't tried the PSX CD's.)

[Yensoo]

Yeah I loaded the suikoden BIN file into jPSXdec but there's no TIM files or image files to export. So I don't know where to go from there.

[BlackDog61]

TiledGGD? The palette is most of the time close to the pixels data.

[Yensoo]

Tried following this tutorial: https://code.google.com/p/tiledggd/wiki/Tutorial

The problem is that none of the files I have from the rom are mentioned. And when I try the save files from epsxe the best I can get is a super small fractured version of something that could be gfx. like this http://gyazo.com/fb7dab2009b2b895a9f2f47845bff374

I'm new to this whole hacking situation. Does anyone have some idea what I'm doing wrong?

[Dashman]

I'd say there's two problems with that image you're showing:

1) Wrong palette (obviously)
2) Wrong tile format.

I don't know about TiledGDD, but using CrystalTile2 Black and I ran into some graphics that looked jagged after reinsertion. This was because the format of the tiles required every pair of pixels to be reversed. It was 4bpp, giving you 2 pixels per byte, so if you had a byte with the value 0x2a you had to store it like 0xa2.

In any case, since you're only looking at the graphics now, what you want to do is test different tile formats until you find the one that makes the graphics look proper. Here's an example from what I was talking about:

[Yensoo]

I tried all the formats in TiledGDD but none work. And I can't open the files in Crystaltile2 as far as I can tell. I can open .BIN files but I don't know if/how I can view images that way.

[Dashman]

The image in my example shows a GIM file extracted from the ISO using TextER. If none of the tools for extracting TIM files works on Suikoden II, well, you'll have to identify the image format looking at the hex and make custom tools to extract and reinsert them. It's a Konami game, so expect custom formats. It's a pain but it's doable.

[Yensoo]

I've only started trying to hack resources like the day before yesterday and I only need a couple things from this one game. SO it's not really worth it for me to learn this whole new hobby just for that. If someone wants to help me out that would be cool, but otherwise I'll just have to draw my own stuff or use screen shots. I was hoping this would be as easy as extracting character sprites (Which I managed to do pretty easy with vram.)
Oh well.

[Pyriel]

Yeah, in the VRAM viewer you're using 4-bit grey, which doesn't bother with CLUT values.  Hit the 9 key to switch to 4-bit/CLUT and then the arrow keys will let you select the right palette from the bottom left.

In Suikoden II the sprite sheets, portraits, and so on are stored, compressed, in the various module files.  Locating the image data varies from file to file, and I've by no means dug up all of it, but it's typically stored as 4-byte size, followed by a 1 byte flag (which IIRC just indicates if the data is compressed or not) and then <size> bytes of data.  If the data is compressed, it can be decompressed as shown here:
http://suikodenbugfixes.wikispaces.com/Suikoden+II+Data+Compression

CLUT data is stored separately from the pixel data, and there are sometimes multiple tables to choose from.  Konami opted for having code everywhere, so the data is somewhat unstructured, and it's often easiest to just try the available color tables until one looks right.  You'll just go mad trying to find some way the data indicates what to use.