Extracting stuff from Amiga games

[SupSuper]

is there a way to extract media (graphics, sound, music, etc.) from Amiga games, with an emulator or some other application? in other emulators i've seen features for such, though there seem to be none on WinUAE.
also, i've asked Team17 and they also don't know

[xpresschok]

On a real Amiga you can use a cartridge such as an Action Replay, in order to freeze memory and extract or modify stuff from there. There are also a few good "rippers" for various media, mostly graphics and music rippers.

However, they all rely on the fact that chip memory on a real Amiga isn't cleared on a warm reboot, so they are all unusable on an emulator. Tough.

[SupSuper]

On a real Amiga you can use a cartridge such as an Action Replay, in order to freeze memory and extract or modify stuff from there. There are also a few good "rippers" for various media, mostly graphics and music rippers.

However, they all rely on the fact that chip memory on a real Amiga isn't cleared on a warm reboot, so they are all unusable on an emulator. Tough.

damn.
well, at least WinUAE can rip music, but i guess i'll have to get sprites and such out of screenies
for those who are wondering how to rip music, press F12 during a emulation (after the disks are loaded) and then on the Config window go to Host > Output > Ripper. the Save Screenshot button, well, saves a screenie and the Pro Wizard button gets all the music it can.

[xpresschok]

well, at least WinUAE can rip music, but i guess i'll have to get sprites and such out of screenies

For sprites and other graphic elements from Amiga games, I found this interesting piece of code which will sort through an uncompressed WinUAE savestate file and let you grab the graphics:
http://retrospec.sgn.net/game-overview.php?link=gfxrip

[K^2]

is there a way to extract media (graphics, sound, music, etc.) from Amiga games, with an emulator or some other application? in other emulators i've seen features for such, though there seem to be none on WinUAE.

Most gaming systems, espetially these that are built for 2D graphics, use standart storage formats for a lot of resources. This allows fairly easy access to graphics and audio directly from ROMs. Amiga was allways more general in its design, so just like on a PC, the format of resources will depend on the program that uses them, and not as much on hardware.

[xpresschok]

Most gaming systems, espetially these that are built for 2D graphics, use standart storage formats for a lot of resources. This allows fairly easy access to graphics and audio directly from ROMs. Amiga was allways more general in its design, so just like on a PC, the format of resources will depend on the program that uses them, and not as much on hardware.

Yes, the trick to ripping graphics is rather straight-forward though: once the graphics has been loaded into video memory it has to conform to a standard, regardless of how it had been stored on the actual game media. This goes for most systems: even a SNES cart can have many different formats (encrypted, compressed, requiring add-on chips etc...) for storing graphics on media but once in video RAM it has to comply with a set standard and can then be searched for (this is how Action Replay and by extension also the Graphics Ripper I linked to works (an UAE savestate is essentially a dump of the current contents of the chip- and fast-RAM).

Music is trickier since it does not have to follow any set standard at any time, even when in memory. It's all handled by a player routine that loads and plays the music. In many classic chips such as the SID and SPC700, this is easily worked around since those audio chips have a dedicated area of RAM which needs only be dumped and contains both the player routine and the currently playing tune. It is then "only" a matter of emulating the audio CPU and you don't need to take into account different audio formats since the ripped player routine handles it all for you.
There are, of course, ripping tools that recognize specific module formats in random locations in the RAM of normal computers (PC, Amiga etc) in which the audio unit does not have a dedicated area of RAM for storing player routines and modules.

[K^2]

If you write directly to the frame buffer, you don't have to store sprites in any particular format, and I am yet to see a system that does not allow that.

But yes, most of the time the sprites are stored somewhere on video RAM, so that they can be quickly copied to the buffer. In that case, looking through a save state is probably the way to go. In case of 8 bit graphics, though, it might be tricky to find the palette.

[M3ntal]

A large percentage of Amiga game music was done in Protracker (MOD) format, which will play in winamp. With many games you can simply browse the game disk (or ROM) from Workbench and copy it from there.

[xpresschok]

A large percentage of Amiga game music was done in Protracker (MOD) format, which will play in winamp. With many games you can simply browse the game disk (or ROM) from Workbench and copy it from there.

Then there's the multitude of more or less common formats such as TFMX, SoundMon and a host of other "small" but still commonly used formats - just have a look through the player routines of DeliPlayer for a hint. Those are considerably less common than the MOD format, I admit, but still make up for a large percentage of Amiga game music. As an aside, most Amiga games used special disk formats and were not browseable in Workbench (and it was even more common among those games that used oddball graphics and music formats). That makes it hard to locate specific resource files. In addition, many games that used standard file systems still bundled their resource files (graphics, music, scripts...) in larger files so as to make ripping harder. In the vast majority of Amiga games, ripping from RAM is the simplest way of finding the particular file you're looking for.