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Metal Slug Advance is the third handheld Metal Slug game, this time developed for the Game Boy Advance. Fortunately, GBA sprite-ripping has been well documented online, making our job overall easier! |
There's 2 ways to rip the sprites effectively: use VisualBoyAdvance on a .gba rom of MSAdv to screenshot the sprites, or use YY-CHR to view the game's tiles of graphics
VisualBoyAdvance is the best option to play and rip from GBA games. It has a ton of useful features for both gameplay and
sprite ripping in the same vein as WinKawaks.
Within VBA are 3 important tools that we're going to use: the Layers, the Map Viewer and the OAM
Viewer.
The Layers are not really tools, but they are a feature useful for both character and background ripping.
They essentially work like Kawaks' Shot factory, but with less options.
When you are playing, simply press Ctrl+(1,2,3,4 or 5) and a layer of the game will be removed.
In this case, I removed the foreground by pressing Ctrl+2, but here's what the rest of the combinations do:
- Ctrl+1 - Removes the HUD
- Ctrl+2 - Removes the foreground
- Ctrl+3 - Removes the background
- Ctrl+4 - Removes the far background
- Ctrl+5 - Removes all of the sprites
(You can also remove them by going to "Options/Video/Layers")
You can then either screenshot the screen with VBA's screencap tool (located under "File/Screen capture...") or use an external way to
screenshot the game.
The Map Viewer (located under "Tools/Map Viewer...") is a tool mainly specialized in background ripping.
Once opened, this window will pop up with the different layers of backgrounds in a 256x256 pixels wide window.
- BG0 - HUD stuff
- BG1 - Foreground
- BG2 - Background
- BG3 - Far background
You can also tick the Auto Update box, so that you can casually play the game while the 256x256 windows updates the background.
Plus there's already a capture button (the "Save..." one) in this window to quickly save the backgrounds.
The OAM Viewer (located under "Tools/OAM Viewer...") is a tool not really optimized for sprite ripping, but can still be used for a
couple of occasions. This tool shows you the sprites currently on screen, which you can scroll through with the little scroll bar.
As you can see, this tool is mainly information-oriented. But it can still help you by showing the entirety of the
sprites on-screen, including their parts hidden off-screen (like the PA 33-21 boat at the beginning of the game).
YY-CHR is a tile-viewing program capable of reading most games' graphic tiles out there.
But the meat of that program is that you can edit the tiles to customize the game. You can find some tutorials
online if you want to learn more about that.
The main advantage of YY-CHR with MSAdv is the ability to rip unused or unseen sprites of the game.
The tiles of MSAdv are weirdly laid out. What I mean by that is that you can only view correctly 1 frame
of an animation at a time by tweaking a bit with the + and - options.
If you couldn't see the correct tiles, here they are:
You can piece the tiles casually with a 8x8 checkered background, but only for this frame unfortunately.
Just play a bit with the + and - buttons to correctly display the next frame.
For the palettes, be sure to apply a different color to each colored square on the right with the numbers in them, so that you can
later recolor the tiles without worrying about duplicates.
Here's an example of 2 pieced back frames of the Japs idle with
different configurations for each frames:
It's pretty long to do. But hey, at least it works!
