Hello all.

I've been a lurker around here for a while but I've finally gotten an account so I can show off some of the stuff I've been working on. Over the last few days I've been figuring out the file format for sprites and animations as they are stored in the PW:AA ROM. I've had quite a bit of success, and I coded up a tool to extract them in bulk as animated GIFs.

Figuring out how things are stored in the GS ROMs is something I've been working on off-and-on for about a year now. It's all part of a greater, more evil plan of mine that will probably never get finished, so I won't get anyone's hopes up by saying more...

Up and until (and including) now, I hadn't ripped anything that hadn't already been captured manually. I know that this site has sprite sheets for just about everything, and for most people that is probably the most convenient format to have them in (so they can create their own animations from the individual frames). Nevertheless, I thought it might be of interest to some people to have the original animation sequences from the game, with correct timings and such.

When I wrote this program I was working exclusively with the AA ROM. Before I went to sleep last night, I decided to try using it on the GS2/3 (DS) ROMs, and voila, it worked (almost) without a hitch. I found one issue with a GS2 sprite, but it just took a quick fix to my program. I've looked through the GS1/2 sprites, and I'm fairly confident that my extraction tool works flawlessly now, converting sprites and animations from their original proprietary format to animated GIFs. I didn't take a close look at the GS3 sprites (I haven't beaten it yet, and I didn't want to spoil anything for myself) but from the quick glance I gave them, they seemed to have come out just fine.

Anyway, without further ado, here are the three complete sprite sets in separate RAR files (each around 10 megabytes):

http://rapidshare.com/files/53222271/gs1_sprites.rar.html
http://rapidshare.com/files/53224538/gs2_sprites.rar.html
http://rapidshare.com/files/53482595/gs3_sprites.rar.html

EDIT: The third link has been updated; Godot's sprites and a couple others now have correct palettes.

Have fun looking for unused animations. I found a few, such as the one of Larry yelling with a rectangle-shaped mouth (051002.gif in the first pack), but then I saw that they were already included on the sprite sheets here (which are pretty darn thorough). There are also some unused frames (frames that exist in the original ROM data that aren't actually referenced by any animation), but by their nature they can't be found in the above packs. I took a look at most of the unused frames in the AA ROM just to see what we were missing, but there was really nothing of interest. Just a few unused combinations of half-opened eyes and mouths along with some random junk (I found frames from one of Gant's clapping animations associated with the wrong tile set, resulting in a jumbled mess of orange).

I don't know if these things deserve to be archived here at Court Records or not. It's kind of redundant because of the sprite sheets, but the sprite pages that have animations like these are missing a bunch of things, as you can see as you look through the packs (they're quite large). For me, it was a matter of having a perfect representation of the all original data (a requirement for my top-secret master plan).

Fun fact: converting these sprites/animations from their original format to animated GIFs results in an over 1000% increase in file size.

Last edited by Invertigo on Wed Sep 05, 2007 2:38 am, edited 1 time in total.

Not shabby, nice work.

I noticed some of the animations are quite broken, but a large part is very so usable - and they're in case-maker friendly format too.

Deufeufeu already made a similir program... how does yours fare with GS4?

Fun fact: the GS3 one includes 3 court overview sprites not hosten on CR: Fawkes standing up, Maya-Mia and Pearl-Mia

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=D You're my hero!

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I'm curious what you mean by "broken". There are a number of things about these ripped animations that may make them seem "broken", but they are in fact exactly what you will find in the ROM. For instance, some parts of Jake Marhsall's sprites look discolored. If you look further in the pack you'll find other animations that consist of only a few parts of his frames, and these are obviously meant to be laid over the first set. However, that's the job of the game engine; my program simply extracts the individual animations the way they are stored. Animations from from cinematics suffer from a similar issue. Animations such as 185000.gif only contain the moving parts of such scenes; they are intended to be laid over a static background, which is stored separately in the ROM.


I was unaware, but now I see that he has. In fact, it seems I have merely duplicated much of his work, but oh well. I have now read most of his posts on these forums, and we appear to have very similar plans that may or may not involve world domination. I sent him an e-mail, and we may be collaborating in ROM hacking efforts in the future.

I haven't looked at GS4 yet, but from what Deufeufeu has said it seems my extraction tool wouldn't work without some considerable modifications.

Considering your hacking contains the proper animation timing, I think it's safe to say you're a step ahead of Deufeufeu.

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Good job.

I haven't checked the PW1/2 sprites let but it PW3, Godot's palette is mucked up.

Also you only seem to have the standard animations. Just in the different poses and that I mean the animations when they are not talking. But this doesn't matter too much as we can just extend the GBA sprites.

Also, unlike Deufeufeu, the palette colours are spot. This will hep a lot.

As it turns out, the palettes for Godot's sprites are specified differently than for almost any other sprite in any of the three games. Figures....

In any case, I updated my program to handle them correctly and re-extracted the GS3 sprites (the only ones affected by the change). The link in my original post has been updated to where you can download the fixed pack. I expect these to be the final versions that I will release. There are some animations that must be composited with others (such as with Chinami's sprites) or with static backgrounds (such as with the cinematics shown before each case) in order to get the final result that is shown on screen in-game, but this is beyond the scope of purpose of my extraction tool.


I assure you, all the animations are there. Are you sure you were looking at them in a viewer capable of showing animated GIFs? ; )

These are great, Invertigo. I've been bugged for a while now to have separate sprites for talking and non talking, but I didn't feel like doing them (haha). I guess I don't have an excuse now!

Plus now that I have the encyclopdia, I can name and arrange the sprites as they're supposed to be labeled.

Do you have any plans to attempt GS4 sprites? I know Deufeufeu was able to grab a bunch, but there were just as many that didn't show up. Until emulation improves we're not really able to manually cap some of the sprites without the witness stand in the way.

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I may end up tackling GS4's sprites sometime in the next couple of weeks, but I'm going to be gone for the next few days. I did take a quick look at the ROM last night and was able to locate and extract the raw sprite data rather quickly using some information that Deufeufeu posted on these forums. The format seems significantly changed, but I won't know much more until I give them a closer look.