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Main - ROM Hacking - How to read Contra(U)'s graphics? New thread | New reply


czxinc
Posted on 07-18-13 03:37 PM Link | Quote | ID: 154340

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Sorry,My English is poor...... Sorry,My English is not good......


Look!It's Garbled.
How to read it correct?

Chaobomr
Posted on 07-18-13 10:01 PM Link | Quote | ID: 154344


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It's technically not garbled. What you're looking at is essentially raw PPU data. It'll look similar on an emulator if you look up the PPU viewer. The code sorts it all out, as well as using the "appropriate" colors.

BTW, your English is fine; you just need to add a space after each punctuation mark.

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snarfblam
Posted on 07-18-13 10:58 PM Link | Quote | ID: 154347


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The problem you're having is that graphic editors tend to assume that graphics are aligned on 16-byte boundaries (e.g. tiles start at $9210, $9220, $9230, etc), but for many games this isn't necessarily true. The graphics you're looking at are off by 2 bytes ($9212, $9222, $9232, etc). You need to use the "+" and "-" buttons to adjust the view. Using a better palette helps, too.


Chaobomr
Posted on 07-19-13 01:33 AM Link | Quote | ID: 154348


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Posted by snarfblam
The problem you're having is that graphic editors tend to assume that graphics are aligned on 16-byte boundaries (e.g. tiles start at $9210, $9220, $9230, etc), but for many games this isn't necessarily true. The graphics you're looking at are off by 2 bytes ($9212, $9222, $9232, etc). You need to use the "+" and "-" buttons to adjust the view.


Should've mentioned that, too. I wasn't completely certain, however

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czxinc
Posted on 07-19-13 09:54 AM Link | Quote | ID: 154349

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Sorry,My English is poor......
Posted by Chaobomr
It's technically not garbled. What you're looking at is essentially raw PPU data. It'll look similar on an emulator if you look up the PPU viewer. The code sorts it all out, as well as using the "appropriate" colors.

BTW, your English is fine; you just need to add a space after each punctuation mark.


I used Translation software....He He He....

Trax
Posted on 07-22-13 05:31 AM Link | Quote | ID: 154388


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Graphics Data in Contra is compressed using a mix of litteral bytes and RLE sequences. That's the reason why only some parts seem to show up correctly in a generic tile editor...

Another reason you most likely need a specific editor is that the graphics are separated in groups or "chunks", each with their own pointer. Each level has its own set of chunks (more than one level can share the same chunk). Within any graphics data sequence, you can also bump into a specific value (0x7F) that triggers a change in the PPU writing location. If you overwrite this part, you will most likely get weird results when you run the game...

And finally, since the graphics data is of irregular size (because of compression), there's a strong possibility of overflow if the new graphics take more space. This is not an issue with uncompressed graphics or CHR banks because each tile take exactly the same space...

Main - ROM Hacking - How to read Contra(U)'s graphics? New thread | New reply

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