NES, Super NES and Mega Drive/Genesis Palettes

[Ai]

I'm thinking about moving to Photoshop for my pixel art.

Is this because you are already using Photoshop for something else?
If not, I suggest moving to something that is actually oriented towards pixel art (like ProMotion, Grafx2, or Graphics Gale); Using Photoshop just for pixel art is rather extreme overkill, and the pixel-oriented programs will also start up a lot quicker and use far less resources.

Is there any program that takes a screenshot of every frame of any program? For example, I said in another topic I wish I could turn Mario's model, as I look at it when I play the game, into a sprite. But since the DS has many fps, it's hard to get every frame, at least the ones I know I want, simply by tapping the snap-shot button in Fraps. I wanted something to take the screenshots for me, and not letting any frame out. Does anything like that exist? Does any of you use it? When I use VisualBoyAdvance, I can go from one frame to another, but the option I have to take a screenshot seems to change the color a bit. Besides, that would come in handy in all other emulators.

There are many screen-recording programs ( I personally use RecordMyDesktop). You need to keep in mind that they have a heavy performance impact, though... most of the movies in the RECORDED PIXEL ART thread only show part of the full screen for this reason -- to improve performance to acceptable levels.

[Arne]

I rarely have troubles with sprite sheets. Except the colors. Apart from that, they rarely miss anything. BTW, even if a sprite ripper puts on a sig, it doesn't necessarily change the palette. If they're using Paint, everything stays well. At least, this is what I hope.

I didn't say that they change the colors by adding sigs, I said they make the file larger than it needs to be. This can be a problem with large maps. It also means that if I want to play around with the actual palette I need to crop away the sig and re-index. Also, putting a sig on someone else's work is bad manners, especially if you try to claim credit.

There are probably some good rippers out there, but you can never be sure if the sprites are intact until you double check yourself.

Even though a sprite sheet looks okay it may not be perfect. Observe the Blaster Master sprites here. Look pretty complete and okay right?
http://tsgk.captainn.net/index.php?p=showgame&t=sy&sy=6&ga=120

Nearly all of the character sprites are corrupted in one way or another, and that are missing frames and characters too.

[Arne]

For the games which have very complicated tile tables which aren't easy to dump, you may have to resort to screenshots. If you do, some emulators lets you turn off the background and set a background color (fceux has the BG color in the .cfg). Turning off sprite flicker can be a good idea too. Then just frame advance or something. I've seen a lot of sprite sheets where a black outline against a black BG has been lost (and then clumsily reconstructed). It may be less of a problem on 16 bit games.