Easily Edit Professor Birch [Emerald]

[Queen Azura]

Greetings! In the process of working on my personal Emerald hack, I was looking into how to replace the sprite of Professor Birch in the intro.
As you may or may not already know, his sprite is not found by unLZ, so I searched the Internet for answers.

All of the tutorials I found stated that hackers must use either TileMolester (which in my opinion is a very painful program, plus the crutch of requiring Java)
or TLP, which is an ancient program that does not actually support Emerald according to my tests.
So, I got curious. And eventually, after much trial and error, I managed to edit his sprite in none other than NSE (Nameless Sprite Editor)!


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What you need:
Sprite Offset: 553A90
Palette Offset: 55A950
Nameless Sprite Editor
(I am using 1.7.5.0 for this, however, 2.x will work.)
A photo editing program such as GIMP or Photoshop (optional)

Step One

Open NSE 1.7.5.0 and open your .gba file.
Under "View", select "Offset". Enter the offsets above. Make sure you set the size to 64x64, and then click "Open".

You should see this:

Step Two

You have two choices here:
1. Edit Birch's sprite directly in NSE.
2. Import your own sprite.

If you choose 1, merely make your changes, hit Save, and you are done. Yay! ♪

If you have a sprite to insert, go to "File", then hit "Import", then "Import Image".
"Load" your image, keeping in mind that it must be an 64x64, indexed 16-colour .PNG or .BMP.
If you do not know how to create such a file, please look through the forum for tutorials on sprite formatting.

Once your sprite has loaded, be sure the drop-down box says "Image", not "Palette" or "All", and click "Save".

Your image should now take Birch's place.

In my game, I used a sprite from Black/White, resized and recoloured to match Birch's palette.
If your sprite's palette does not match Birch's, you will have to edit your image to fit his colours.

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I hope this tutorial is able to help those struggling with editing the Pokemon Professor in their hacks.
I have not tested this method in Ruby or Sapphire, but the offsets are

Sprite Offset (Ruby): 39DC14
Palette Offset (Ruby): 39E414

Sprite Offset (Sapphire): 39DA5C
Palette Offset (Sapphire): 39E25C

(thanks to itari for the offsets!)

Thanks for reading, and happy hacking! ♥
​

 

[Danny0317]

Very nice tutorial! I was gonna do something like this a few days ago but completely forgot. :D

 

[Queen Azura]

Very nice tutorial! I was gonna do something like this a few days ago but completely forgot. :D

Thank you! And it seems I saved you some work :D I want to make a huge push to get more people hacking Emerald~♪ (...notbiasedatall)

 

[esperance]

You know, this tutorial isn't too bad. But, wouldn't it be simpler to do this using NSE 2.1? It was made to do tasks like this.

Also, the Ruby palette works, but the image is actually 39DC14.
The Sapphire palette is 39E25C and the image is 39DA5C.

 

[Queen Azura]

You know, this tutorial isn't too bad. But, wouldn't it be simpler to do this using NSE 2.1? It was made to do tasks like this.

Also, the Ruby palette works, but the image is actually 39DC14.
The Sapphire palette is 39E25C and the image is 39DA5C.

Thank you for the offsets! I'll add them in.

NSE 2.x is unable to view Trainer sprites in Emerald as well as being unable to navigate to a 64x64 sprite. Even when "64" is typed into the width and height, his sprite shows only in garbled, chopped-up bits. Unless there is some secret to fixing this that I am not aware of, using 1.7.5.0 is the only way I know.

 

[esperance]

Thank you for the offsets! I'll add them in.

NSE 2.x is unable to view Trainer sprites in Emerald as well as being unable to navigate to a 64x64 sprite. Even when "64" is typed into the width and height, his sprite shows only in garbled, chopped-up bits. Unless there is some secret to fixing this that I am not aware of, using 1.7.5.0 is the only way I know.

I think you misunderstand. In NSE 2.X, the sizes you type in are actually the size of the sprite in "tiles", that is 8 x 8 sections of an image. So, for a 64 x 64 pixel image, the size would be 8 x 8 tiles in NSE 2.X.

 

[Queen Azura]

I think you misunderstand. In NSE 2.X, the sizes you type in are actually the size of the sprite in "tiles", that is 8 x 8 sections of an image. So, for a 64 x 64 pixel image, the size would be 8 x 8 tiles in NSE 2.X.

Ah, I see. That is something that I didn't know. (it'd be nice if it stated that). Thanks for the info.

 

[anonyboy]

I've Just done extacly what you did but for brendan's backsprites...

Offsets:
Palette: D61A30
Frame 0: D66480
Frame 1: D66C80
Frame 2: D67480
Frame 3: D67C80

 

[GalladedOlive]

How do I insert the Palette my Image uses, then? It's a 16-Color Bitmap, & I've tried selecting Palette & All, but they don't help me out. I'm very confused & need some help.