MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: Disable sprite and background layers

I forgot: If for some reasons the thread gets forgotten even though it was not resolved and the people just suddenly stopped answering*, the question is forever off-limits.

* Which seems to be an issue here. I've never seen a forum where the chance that a thread is answered is so random as in this forum:

My thread about input lag was one of the longest threads on the first page. Then it was locked because of some stupid flaming moron. When I opened a second one to continue the conversation: Zero replies.

Or a question that should be relatively easy to answer for someone who knows a bit about the source code: How does MAME detect which colors to display in games that use more than 10000 of it? Surely, they are not hard-coded, are they? Unlike in an NES emulator where you can just map an RGB value to each of the 64 colors in the palette. Which is actually manually doable. But I doubt this was done in a game with 16 bit graphics. But do you think anybody gave even the most basic answer or the slightest hint on how the colors are produced? Nope, not a single reply, even though the question was in no way obscure.

So, yeah, I did a second thread about the same topic. Because the last one died right in the middle of the conversation. And with this forum's randomness, maybe I would have had success. I mean, I even included new findings, like the fact that Nebula can disable individual sprites. So, again, maybe a code expert could have told me: "Oh yeah, the individual sprites are processed in cps1.c, line so and so. If you insert an if-else-condition with the indices of all the sprites that you don't want to show, they can be made invisible." Or something like that.

And no, I don't have any interest in asking the MUGEN community. I'm not looking for individual sprite or background sheets. Even for that, a savvy user could have directed me to the game's hidden object test instead of simply telling me to grab pictures from da interwebs. (As if I wouldn't have thought of it myself if it had been an option. "Oh really, you can find pictures of the fighters if you search the net? Thanks a lot. You helped me very much. I would have never thought that the internet can be used to find cryptic stuff like pictures.")
So, no, sprite sheets don't do it. I'm looking for a way to clean an actual game scene of its status data. A game scene with the correct position of all the visible objects from this particular camera perspective. Because, as you might know, you cannot just paste the background of "Street Fighter II" together as if it were freaking "Super Mario Bros." If I let a fighter take two steps to the right when the breakable statue in Bison's stage is visible, the perspective might put the statue yet in another position. You cannot just take a panorama view of the stage from a PNG file, put two fighter sprites somewhere, cut out a rectangle of 384 x 224 pixels and expect this to look like the scene would actually look in the game.