Pleas for help

(regarding sprites)

Believe it or not, I'm human, too! If I wasn't then I could fly around the world backwards to reverse time and give me enough time to sort out my own problems, but alas. Problems are listed in terms of vague priority. Personally, getting the arcade problems solved would help me more, but Metal Slug 6 has just been kicking about for so long that I want it off my shoulders.

Metal Slug 6

I've had the ISO for this game kicking about on my PC for ages, hogging it up with it's nearly 3gb size, and my attempts to get graphics from it have been futile. Why? Bonkers file system.

In the ISO there's the folder ROMDATA. Inside that is MS6. And inside that is another called AFS. And there lies the source of my problems. PVRALL.AFS. It's got all the graphics in the game, more or less; that part is simple enough. I just take it out of the ISO, open it up with AFS Extract, and then browse through the files until I find something appealing. Then I export that file, and surely it should be rippin' time, right?

Well, not really. Clark's graphics are named pvr_PL006_CLA.bin. Every file starts with that PVR title, yet they're all .BINs. Still, they open up just fine in the likes of Tile Molester and YY-chr, so that's not stopping me from ripping them.

Except for that.

You can tell there are graphics there; rather disorganised graphics that are bound to be a pain in the ass to assemble, and graphics that are kind of screwed up beyond recognition, but it's unmissable that there are graphics there in some vague sense of the word. The problem lies in that I cannot find a way to make them not ugly. Every codec keeps them as a jumbled mess, and tinkering about with other settings doesn't bring much joy either. I was given the suggestion they were compressed in some way, and that's where I thought the PVR in their title would become relevant. Except PVRViewer won't accept .bins. Hm! Hex viewers have proved little help as well, though that's probably because I know jack shit about those things.

I assume it's playable on emulators, being relatively easy on the hardware, but to rip that way with a game this animated would just be hilariously stupid. So if anyone could find a way to get them graphics viewed properly, that'd be super swell.

NeoGeo

On a similar subject, there's a number of NeoGeo games I'd like to rip, but Kawaks tile viewer doesn't work good on those games. For whatever reason, it's built for Capcom games, and lets you see the whole column of tiles before it moves onto the next one. For whatever reason, the NeoGeo tile viewer leaves a few tiles off-screen, requiring you to move a few spaces to see them. This sounds like a minor hassle at most, but when you're trying to get all the tiles so you can assemble them later, it becomes a very, very laborious task; especially when you can effectively zip through the Capcom games and get all you need in a couple of minutes. For shame!

Note how the other half of that explosion on the bottom left corner isn't shown, but instead the lower part of another explosion frame.

Additionally, I can never get around this by extracting the files and viewing them in Tile Molester or anything, because they always come up kookoo. If I could do that, it would save me a lot of time in ripping and assembling, but no dice.

help plz

Arcade

On that subject, a large number of arcade games don't really work that well when it comes to viewing their graphics.

Captain America and The Avengers, for instance, has the graphics looking how they should at 2BPP; which means they've only got four colours, effectively rendering them incorrect.

Upping it to 4BPP (16 colours) turns them into unidentifiable messes, surely a complicated scheme of the Red Skull! A lot of games have this problem, and since MAME's tile viewer is an absolute joke, you're left with the worst task of all: Ripping them from screenshots. That's not how I roll. Sadly, arcades, being the complicated beasts they are, I can't imagine this being easily solved.

CITA: The Enemy

I've got the NPCs ready to go, but I don't have the patience to play the game and find the palettes for these guys. They're all using the main character's colour set. Just screenshots or even descriptions would work well, as there's only seven palettes for characters in the game.

Rebelstar Tactical Command

These four creatures can't be selected in the free play campaign, and would actually require playing the game. Screw that, I say. A savestate would be nice so I could get the whole palette and not just that of one frame.