|  |  |  | Where to extract the sprites from |  |  |  |

Except very few exceptions, we'll mostly get the sprites from an emulator. There are good emulators for practically any decent 2D system, and the vast majority of them feature functions to make ripping easier, which is always welcome. There are two features which are highly desirable our emulator supports: one, an option to enable and disable the background or the different graphic layers the system has (almost every emulator has this), which will allow us to disable everything but the character and/or any effect related to him/her; and two, an option to advance the action frame by frame, which will let us work more precisely and easily, and, mos importantly, we'll be able to count with total accuracy the time (# of ticks) each frame lasts, so we can later transfer this to the animations file (.act) and get exact animations (only if this is what we want, of course).

Due to the fact that the most ripped formats are, by far, Neo-Geo and CPS2 (Capcom games system), i'll elaborate a bit more here. I'd like to reccomend an emulator: Nebula. It's capable of emulating both systems perfectly, and it's ripping interface is very friendly. Can advance the action frame by frame, with a curious feature: while advancing a frame we can push a button or direction, and this input will affect the game. This way we can execute complicated movements with little effort. Another excellent emulator, Kawaks, shares the same features (plus it can be run in a window), but it's ripping interface isn't so friendly and, as it was designed to run CPS2 games, it has very few options to disable layers or sprites in Neo-Geo games, but putting this aside it is very valid too. If we're ripping from a Neo-Geo, another option would be to use the classic (but perfectly competent) NeoRageX, which features a really good ripping interface, also with frame-by-frame action advancing, and that, differing from Nebula, enables and disables the entire sprites (in Nebula you must disable every tile which makes a sprite or a background). Summing up, we can't complain on the emulators here ;).

Ripping interfaces comparison between the three emulators: Nebula, Kawaks and NeoRageX.

Besides these emulators it is also worth of mentioning the very famous Final Burn, which was the first emulator to run CPS2 games and right now is the fastest of all, but as it is completely oriented towards gaming and not to fiddle with the games, it's not useful for ripping.

I'd like to comment briefly a little trick to clean sprites when the emulator doesn't allow to disable the background. It consists in creating two palettes for the graphics edition software we're using: one, containing every color in the screenshot (we'll try taking the shots in an scenery with few, not changing, colors, and moving as little as possible to prevent the colors from changing), and another one which will be the same as the first one, but with every color which DOESN'T belong to the character changed to a color we are sure doesn't belong to the character, for example an intense pink. Now, we'll apply the first palette to the screenshot, thus reducing it to 256 colors, and then we apply the second one, but taking care of not changing the color indexes (in Paint Shop Pro this is achieved selecting the mantain indexes option when applying the palette). If we made the palettes well, this will turn the background pink and our character will be all clean and shiny ;).

A final advice: some emulators offer the option to change the background to an intense pink color. Use this option whenever it's present. You'll find out why in the palette management section.