If anyone is still interested in getting the colored images, I think I found a way to get them. I managed to extract the grayscale images last year like Lance did but couldn’t find out where the color palette was stored either. After testing the Saturn emulators again I was planning to just take a screenshot of all the CD change/ending images but I don’t really have the time to play through the game several times to get all of them.
So the idea I had was to actually replace the background at the title screen with the other images: basically I used the debug functionality of Yabause to look up where the actual image and color palette are being stored in the VDP2 VRAM and CRAM. Once I found those I could find out which files contained the palettes, and it turned out to be the .PRG files (the ones I examined seem to contain two palettes). I then dumped those palettes (the ones used in the “change CD” images) in separate files and uploaded both that and the .SCB file into the VDP2 memory using Yabause again and it actually replaced the background with the image I uploaded. So basically I think I can get the colored versions of all the ending images that way.
I have no idea exactly what the .PNB files are or how the color palette is applied to the images though, and I’m not sure if it’s worth figuring out since all the other .SCB files only seem to contain the ingame ground and sky textures.
I think I got all the images (4 used during “change CD” screen, 4 ending images and the background used for the load/save game menu) except for the title screen used in the Japanese version, anyone that has that version could simply use an emulator to take a screenshot of it (alternatively I’d simply need the relevant SCB and perhaps PRG file to extract it). There’s one image where the color palette looks a bit odd, does anyone remember if it’s actually supposed to look this way?
I don’t think I made a mistake since the other color palettes didn’t match with the image at all, but since I haven’t seen the original version I can’t be 100% sure. You can download all the images (PNG versions) here:
It seems almost right actually… there’s a bell ringing in my head about that picture looking odd to me at the time even. Maybe I’ll dig out the ol’ Saturn finally, though I couldn’t find the video hookups last time I tried…