Steve Minutillo :: messy-78messy things

For absolutely no good reason, my latest thing is ripping music and sprites from old video games. I did this animated gif of Chun-Li the old fashioned way, which means I take screenshots from MAME and then import them into Photoshop for painstaking pixel by pixel cutout work. (actually just masking out the colors of the background works well and is pretty fast)

I also know I can rip music by setting up one of those programs that records all the sound passing through your sound card to a file. But both of these methods are a pain: Screenshots and cutting out sprites takes too long, and recording music means you’ll also record sound effects. I want to go right to the source! So I downloaded the source. Of MAME. And I’m looking at it now.

It seems there’s some defines in there to do just exactly what I want, to dump out the sprites as they’re rendered to all seperate files, and to dump the sound, channel by channel, also to seperate files! But, you need to compile those flags in. It looks like the path of least resistance there is to do the work on my PC since MAME only compiles out of the box on the Mac if you have CodeWarrior.

Of course by relying on the lazyweb I can get some of what I want for free: Here’s an MP3 of Chun-Li’s music, and one of Rastan. But I want more. I want ALL.