2.2: Artmoney Tutorial Part 1

In this interactive tutorial by “Just No Point” from Mugen Fighters Guild, he explains the basics of ripping with Artmoney. This tutorial is for people who want to have a better understanding on the fundamentals, of ripping with such an advanced tool. It will be pasted here, word for word.

Section 1: Artmoney Tables

Okay this is going to (hopefully) be the (sp->)layman-ist tutorial ever :P Basically I will start off with a post and some people that want to use artmoney can interact and let me know any problems they have. People that know how to use artmoney can post the next phase of the tutorial but only people wanting to learn to use artmoney should reply saying that they succeeded or had a problem with what was last mentioned. Never tried a tutorial like this but I always thought it may work well. Experiment time. :D

Download Artmoney.
http://www.artmoney.ru/

To use someone else’s artmoney table you may have to find an offset. Sometimes artmoney tables will just work for you without you doing anything but this will show you what to do if they do not work. You will be required to know how to use artmoney a bit to do this. I generally find the timer value as it is usually the easiest/fastest. If that does not work I find an axis.

First thing you do is load up the artmoney table.

Next find any value that is on the artmoney table. If the timer or axis is on the table I already showed you how to find them above. Find one of them.

Next highlight the value you found then highlight the same value that was already in the table you uploaded. Right click and press “Apply the Offset to all”
Alternatively you can simply press Alt+A while both are highlighted.

offset

That’s it. You can save your new table and it should work with your game from then on without you having to repeat this process. If you change computers or something you may have to do this again but it is simple enough.

Here are artmoney tables contributed:

http://www.justnopoint.com/Tables/


Section 2: Values
This section of the tutorials will cover values, as explained by Joram “Zwei Fuss” Norwak

tutorial03

Joram”Zwei Fuss” Nowak said:

The marked areas on the screenshot are of importance and I’ll just briefly describe them here:

1 – ‘Search’ – Search will be used to look for values in memory. This will only be used the first time you search for a new value, every new search for this value will be searched for using the ‘Filter’ button.

2 – ‘Filter’ – This is used after ‘Search’ is used once. It filters the searches down based on certain criteria, which will be expanded on later.

3 – ‘Process Selector’ – Using the pull-down menu here, select the running Chankast process. This tells ArtMoney which process to search in.

4 – ‘Found Addresses Window’ – If you tell ArtMoney to do so, it will dump all the found addresses in here. Usually it’s not a good idea to do this at the very start of the search, as thousands of unintelligable values will be dumped here on the first search.

5 – ‘Address Editor Window’ – Here is where you’ll be editing the addresses. The arrows between these two areas push all the values to this window. The top one puts the selected values in the left window to the right, while the bottom one puts all of them in.

6 – ‘Load’ – This loads up an ArtMoney table. I will provide you with some that I have done, with help from JJWE for some addresses.

7 – ‘Save’ – Save the table once the values have matched up with your PC. This will be explained later.

In the ‘Additional’ Tab, The top portion played a great role for me when I was ripping ‘non-flashing’ Gill way back when I first started using ArtMoney. But after I discovered the animation test method, I sort of disregarded this part. Either way, I found the values above for refresh-time and freeze-time to be good enough to hold the freeze on Gill to prevent him from altering his colour. You see, if these values aren’t low enough he would rapidly switch between colours even if I had his colour address frozen! This happened because as the game was feeding him his new palette, ArtMoney wasn’t quick enough to turn it back to the value I had frozen. So that’s why they have to be low to work. The bottom box I highlighted is useful if you want to see the addresses in Hexadecimal mode. It’s just nice sometimes to be able to see how the game works, because this is much closer to actual program code than the Integers we will be using.


Section 3: Finding Values to use

Now that you have learned what everything is and how to set some options up lets go to what I usually start off doing when I first get a game.

Trying to find the 1st value the fastest. The fastest easiest value to generally find in a fighting game is the timer.

So load up SFA3 on kawaks and select the game from the list in artmoney.

select1

Now get to the fight.
sfatimer

Click “SEARCH” in artmoney.

Go to custom and set artmoney to only search for 1 and 2 bytes.
custom
1-2bytes
Since in the SFA3 image above the timer is at 99 before we begin the search we want to search for that exact value.
Exact Value
Now click “OK” to begin the search.
search
Now let the clock go down to 98 in the game.
sfa398
This time you will push “FILTER” and search for the exact value 98.
filter 98
You will find 1 value.
found
Add it to the list on the right with either arrow. The Red arrow will add whatever is selected and the green arrow will add everything.
Add
Now you can name that value whatever you like and save it so you will always have it. You can alter the value 99 to be any number and the timer will change correspondingly.
save
If you want to freeze the timer all you simply have to do is click to the left of the name under the “F”
freeze
This wraps up this part of the tutorial. In the next post I will tell why finding this value 1st will help save you time on future values and we will find Ryu’s X and Y axis. This will be continued in another page associated with ArtMoney here on this site, at a later date. This page’s purpose, is to allow you to understand how something like ArtMoney works, when finding values to rip sprites or alter values in an arcade game.

Leave a Reply