I wrote a graphics ripper for Williams games 20 years ago (on my Amiga!), and updated it 10 years ago for Windows: www.seanriddle.com/ripper.html It's specifically for that platform's 4-bit graphics, in either screen layout or blitter layout, but it will read any 64K file and try to display what it finds. I split out the Space Invaders 1M file into 16 64K files and ran it on those. There are sprites for all 5 of the games, as well as the Radica logo and the menu, and even a diagnostic mode with pass/fail graphics. So it really looks like all the data is in the ROM file, and I bet all the code is, too. Bank 0 has Colony 7 sprites, bank 1 has the Radica logo, bank 2 has the menu graphics, bank 3 has Space Invader sprites, bank 4 has Phoenix sprites, bank 5 includes what looks like a little Phoenix title screen, bank 8 has Lunar Rescue sprites, bank 9 has the Diagnostic Mode graphics, and bank 13 has Qix sprites.
I did a quick search for a "graphics explorer" type of program where you could define the width and height and bit depth, and scan through a binary file displaying each block of w*h*d/8 bytes, but didn't find anything. Anyone know of something like this?
The first time I dumped this Space Invaders Plug n Play ROM, I had a tiny solder bridge to one of the high address lines, and didn't notice it I soldered wires to 33 pads of a TSOP48!). So I wrote a little program to check a binary file to see if the data repeats at any interval that indicates that an address line is tied high or low. Is there any program that checks for common dumping issues? I was thinking about checking for address and data lines tied high or low or shorted to any other address or data lines. I usually check for data lines tied high/low by running a histogram on the hex file, but it would be nice to have one tool that checks several issues.
