OMG HOW I RIP SPRITES
[last updated: 20/June/2009]
I have no problem with people asking me how I ripped such and such a sprite. Knowledge is power, and you cannot gain knowledge without asking questions.
My problem, however, is the fact that a majority of the people I attempt to help are impatient buggers who refuse to listen to what is said without it being broken down into microscopic baby steps. And I'm not renowned for my ability to make things understandable to people.
So in an attempt to stop being pestered so much, I made this semi-tutorial thing. I meant to do it as one of the first things for the site, but back then I worked on non-sprite content frequently, and I know a bit more now, so it makes sense at this time.
[note to the sensitive: I'm a cynical ass-face in this. I'm less so about other subjects!]
C3---GGD exercise (Luminous Arc!)
Tiles are what most graphics are made up of; 8x8 squares that contains bits and pieces that make up characters, obstacles, backgrounds and lots of things! This isn't just a failed attempt at making a foreword, but it's note for when you're piecing things together.
Tiled graphics are dubbed "1-Dimensional" in Tile Molester, whereas bitmap graphics are "2-Dimensional". I've no idea why, since they both have the width and height part, but I'll be using it to make the difference between the two.
YY-CHR is a simplistic emulator more suited for the likes of SNES, Mega Drive, Game Boy and NeoGeo Pocket games. It can view in 1bpp, 2bpp and 4bpp, and has a very easy-to-work-with interface. Let's start off with a basic demonstration on how to rip NES graphics! I'm going with Gimmick!, a game you should check out.
The tool is nice enough to start you off at where the graphics begin when looking in NES games, instead of making you have to find them yourself, but not like it's a big deal.
Here, you can see the main character is scrambled, and would need piecing together. Not necessarily. See the "Normal" dropdown list at the bottom left?
It allows you to organise the tiles in varying ways, although the Normal, FC/NES and Vertical settings are about the only conventional ones. Choose FC/NES x16 and...
Voila! Now all you need is to reattach his back and fin on, and that's him. And also get his colours, of course. Or...
Change it to Vertical, and now only one back needs reattached! It's always good to experiment with things, or else you'd miss out on a time-saving opportunity like this.
As you can see, one of the sprites on the second column lacks a back. A lot of games reuse parts to make things, although since all of Gimmick!'s graphics are kept neatly together, it's not too offending. Some games have copies of parts, which ultimately takes up space in the game, but is very handy for a sprite ripper. It's why I love Metal Slug: 2nd Mission. :]
You may notice that a few games, such as The Legend of Zelda, don't look up to scratch. I'll cover that now, with a NeoGeo Pocket game as an example.
So yeah, this is a worse case than Zelda, and is in no good condition for ripping or looking at. So start hitting the - or + key.
Lo and behold, they're distinguishable now! The - and + keys alter the offsets, and thus if something doesn't look right, give it a few poundings and maybe that will clear things up.
For whatever reason, whenever you open a NeoGeo Pocket game, the viewing format doesn't change, makings things look really wacky. You can solve this by clicking the drop-down above the viewing organisation and choose 2BPP NGP.
And before we move onto SNES sprites, I'd like to mention the colours. The default palette is more suited for four colour/2BPP games like the two consoles I just covered, so if I don't have a save state of the game at hand, I choose this contrasting palette. The colours all contrast against each other, so there's no chance of me accidentally giving a colour to the wrong location when finishing up.
So I'm ripping from Super Ninja-kun, a game that's just okay but has its adorable graphics laid out nicely. But, uh, yeah, they're kinda messed up. Time to hit the offsets!
There we are! SNES games have really wacky offset effects, where if you offset things enough, the graphics sort of split into shadow things, like that thing M.Bison does before he pulls the Psycho Crusher and kills my Blanka ass flat.
However, a problem you may see with SNES games is that either there are no graphics to rip, or very little. That's because they're compressed; something that's fairly common and is present in almost everything that aren't NES or NeoGeo Pocket games. There are some tools that decompress the graphics, but they're usually built for only one game, so where's the fun in that? Check out the "Gameplay extractors" section for more information.
And since I can't fit it in anywhere, you can view the graphics with the proper palettes by importing a save state, which is a simple matter of clicking the "Palette" tab, choosing "Emulator state load" and finding your save state. Easy! And you can either get the graphics into a paint program by copying them out (Ctrl + C) or pressing F9, which creates a bitmap image of them in YY-CHR's folder.
These are Alan Grant's graphics from Jurassic Park, and they fit neatly into 32 x 40 boxes. You could rip them as they are, piecing them together in your image program, or you could use...
(ROMhacking.net download) (download here)
(requires Java Runtime Environment to work)
One of Tile Molester's advantages is the fact you can increase or decrease the size of the viewing space, which means...
No assembly required, in most cases! And that's just one thing. Advantages Tile Molester has over YY-CHR is the fact it can view graphics from 1BPP all the way up to 32BPP, view them in Linear or Planar, toggle between 1-Dimensional and 2-Dimensional, and so on. This, naturally, makes no sense when you hear those actual terms, but when told via examples...
It can view DS games!
Nintendo 64 games!
PlayStation games!
The files inside the DS and PlayStation games, even! And N64 save states! And probably more if it weren't for the fact I want this finished inside a day.
New problems arise in the fact that having palettes when viewing things are much more important, as graphics for those featured consoles can have 256 colours, which you just can't go plucking from an emulator screenshot and applying wherever necessary. But Tile Molester's palette finding ability is a monster. You can make custom colours (a requirement for when you can pluck the palette from the game, as the default palette for 4BPP graphics is terrible), import a palette from inside the file or from a save state, although it's very picky on what it can choose and doesn't allow you to use .pal files.
Thankfully, that's where the modified .XML file comes in! Replace the "tmspec" file that comes in the normal Tile Molester download with this one and .pal files will be among the recognised files if you import an external palette! This file's pretty darned hard to find, so hopefully the download here will help make it less. Thanks to Raccoon Sam for sending me it and his unnamed buddy for sending it to him!
In addition, Sam's upgraded it to support more than just .pal! It allows you to make use of the following file types:
Nintendo DS Color Resource, .rlcn
Oswan Save States, .wss
Richard Bannister's Oswan Save States, .frz
FCEUltra Save States,
.fc?
Genecyst/Kega/Gens Save States, .gs?
NESticle Save States, .st?
ZSNES Save States, .zs?
Tile Layer Pro palette, .tpl
Windows Palette, .pal
Yowza. I'm under the assumption there's more to come so don't hold back on downloading it again and again! (just don't use up that bandwidth y'hear)
See those lines underneath each frame of discoloured Agumon? There are a few junk bits there, but for the most part, that's his palette. You're suppose to line them up against the very top of the window, and enter their address into the Palette > Import From > This File window. But stupidity in design! The address format TM uses for browsing is in hex, which goes 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F. The address format the palette window wants is decimal, just plain numbers. This means that you either need to know how to convert from hex, or you need to use GGD as a palette address finding partner. More on that later.
Yet another palette problem is the fact that if a palette is stored separately from the graphics, you can't simply import them from that file because it won't accept anything other than a save state. This means that you need to find where the palette is in that file, copy the tiles it is located in and paste them into the graphics file, and then get their address in that file and use them in the palette importer. A hideously clunky method, but it's better than GGD's tile-related downfall.
Another problem is the fact that 2D graphics need to be at the correct width for them to be seen correctly, and Tile Molester can only go 8 pixels at a time. If the graphics' correct viewing width are between those 8 pixels, tough luck, you can't get them, and will need GGD again to solve the problem.
(download from here because it's ludicrously rare on the internet; English translation by Dazz)
GGD is similar to Tile Molester in terms of what it can do, but the interface is a lot different and takes some getting used to. For one thing, it's actually three different windows as one program.
There's the graphics window, which is the main part. You scroll through it with the Page Up and Page Down keys, the image can be changed in size (and thus, allow 2D sprites to be seen correctly) with the arrow keys, and holding Ctrl while hitting the arrow keys changes the total image size.
There's the Color Palette Window, which is very important. It can also be scrolled through with the Page Up and Page Down keys; just click on what window you want to scroll through first.
The Information Window, which shows all the technical hoo haas and also shows off the key controls, which I'll attempt to explain. Have the graphics or palette window highlighted when doing these, or else they'll do nothing.
W and H alter how many pixels you go through with the arrow keys.
E toggles between LittleEndian and BigEndian (sort of like the reverse order setting in Tile Molester)
B changes BPP (GGD lacks a 2BPP option)
S toggles through far you scroll with Page Up and Page Down (click on the window you want to adjust)
O toggles through palette bytes, which I suppose would be worth trying if you can't find a palette.
P cycles through the red, green and blue order of palettes. No idea when it would be useful.
X changes the palette in some way; again, handy for being unable to find one.
S, again, just shows how far you scroll with the Page Up/Down keys. This one's for the palette window.
And finally, A is an AlphaTest, but only seems to work on certain files though helps if the graphics still don't look right.
And since I've already talked about the key commands, here's the tabs. For the most part, they're useless as the keys already do they do, although the first tab, in order...
Opens a file to view its graphics.
Saves the graphics you're viewing as a BMP.
Open a file to view its palette.
Save the palette as a .BIN, a .PAL or a .DAT.
The forth tab resets the palette to a default one; one for 4BPP, and three one for 8BPP.
And that's it. The fourth one allows you to reset to one of four default palettes, but that and the first tab are the only useful ones.
A major problem with GGD is that it only views things vertically. This is no problem for 2D graphics, but for 1D stuff, they just show up as a vertical stream of tiles. Unless you have extreme patience, this is not the way to go, so you can't use GGD alone for ripping DS sprites or something. That's why I strongly suggest using GGD as a partner of sorts to Tile Molester, since it can take care of finding palettes while Tile Molester gets the graphics.
And just to further spell it out to those who can't grasp the concept...
To find palettes, you click on the palette window and scroll through with Page Up and Page Down (I suggest setting the Pal Shift Mode to 256 for the most part, unless you know where it is; then 64KBytes is a great help in skipping through)...
...until you find what looks like the palette. The first colour is usually the background or transparency, and is often a pitch black or a bright colour different from those used on the sprites, so go with those first.
Look at the left number in Palette Offset and remember it. ('course this example image is entirely unrelated to the rest of the images, from an entirely different game, but you should get the point)
Copy the Palette Offset (the one on the left; the right one is in hex, and that's not what you want) and enter it into Tile Molester's Import From > This File command.
If it's correct, good going!
If not, tinker around a little more and keep entering new offsets and see if it works. Just altering the offset by 2 can make a huge difference to appearances.
And since I've apparently run out of things to say, I'd like to mention that the graphics of the PlayStation Ganbare Goemon games are stored in 2-Dimensions, but look as if they are 1-Dimensional/tiled. I've no idea how to fix it. :{
A terrible term, I know, but these are basically things that let you access graphics via alternate means. Or essentially, mini-utilities. Because graphics viewers are utilities. I need better terms.
(homepage)
vSNES can open a ZSNES save state and do a variety of things, such as edit cheats, music and look at the save state preview, look at the saved area and remove layers, but most importantly; look at graphics. It can only view the graphics that are loaded at the time of save, but it's better than nothing.
You can alter the size of the image to piece things together better, or have it huge so everything can be saved into one image. It's a handy little tool, although some games get better results than others.
(homepage)
Yeah, it's a Game Boy and Game Boy Advance emulator, but it's got two brilliant tools: A tile viewer and a map viewer!
The tile viewer lets you view varying kinds of graphics, cycle through palettes, and save the tiles as PNGs or BMPs. Very nice. It's simplistic, but there's not much more you could need for a tile viewer, really. The map viewer is even more basic, but, you know, is good for maps. There's also an OAM viewer, which in most GBA games, will let you view the whole, mostly-assembled sprite. Handy for multi-layered bosses or obscured objects.
If things need rearranged, make a save state, extract the file inside it (using WinRar or something, but WinZip may be all you need), and the file inside (named "[Content]") can be opened in the tile viewer of your choice. Hooray! This trick works with lots of save states for portable games, including DeSmuME (DS), Red Dragon (Virtual Boy), NeoPop (NeoGeo Pocket) and possibly more. Dare to believe you can just try!
(homepage)
Another emulator, this time for the DS, it also features a tile, map and OAM viewer. But, well, they're a bit crap.
The tile viewer is decent enough, although a bit complicated at first as the sprites and backgrounds and all that are split into multiple parts, usually about five or so. It's understandable, as there are a lot more graphics loaded than GBA games, but it would've been nice to have the option of having them all together and just scrolling through them.
The second problem with the tile viewer is that the colours are slightly off. I'm unsure if it's the tile viewer that has the incorrect colours, or the palette viewer or the game itself, but the colours are ever so slightly different, and to a nagging perfectionist like myself, this is frustrating.
Additionally, there's no option to save the graphics as a PNG into a folder or anything, but no big deal.
The map viewer, for some incredibly idiotic reason, has been squashed since version 5, I think, though they've managed to fix it in the most recent version, so my previous argument is rather moot!
And the OAM viewer is similarly pointless, as all it does is remove the backgrounds, an option you can do in-game (stupidly, the layer removal can't allow you to remove sprites). You can use buttons to scroll through things, but it doesn't actually change anything. One wonders why the hell it's even in there.
DeSmuME is still a work-in-progress, so there's a chance these all may be fixed in the future, but at the moment, No$GBA has made excellent progress when it comes to playing the games, namely 3D ones, so that could be worth a shot, although it's severely lacking the sprite features and it takes a minute for Mario Kart DS to finish the ready-set-go part of a race.
Another emulator, this is plain ol' Gens, except with two new features in the CPU tab; dumping and importing. The primary thing is the fact you can dump the loaded graphics and a palette for use in Tile Layer Pro, which you can open in any old tile viewing program and rip.
A very nice feature, although the emulator has a habit of crashing immediately after any of these features are used, so make save states before you use them.
(Tahaxan homepage) (NDSHeader download from GBAtemp)
These two program can open up DS ROMs, extract the files and even decompress certain file types!
Tahaxan is more geared towards individual files and has a basic viewer of palettes and images and can decompress some .NARC files, while NDSHeader is better if there's nothing fancy with the files and all you need is all of them extracted.
They're easy to use and essential for DS ripping, though you'll still need Tile Molester and the likes to access a lot of the files.
(source)
The usefulness of MAME's tile viewer has eluded me for a long, long time.
Hit F4, and you'll appear on the palette screen, and if you hit Enter you'll progress to the graphics screen, the TMAP screen (essentially background bitmaps), and then back to palettes. The up/down and Page Up/Page Down keys scroll through the graphics, left and right cycle through palettes, and the [ and ] keys scroll through the various graphic and TMAP banks. You can also use - and + to shrink or expand the amount of tiles on-screen, but it's pretty useless; you can't have any more tiles than the original resolution can show, so you can't stretch the window to get more, sadly; plus even if you try to just get a vertical stream of tiles, the tiles are doubled in size to fill the screen, which kills a potentially useful ability.
Of course, what luck you get is going to be variable. Some games are very kind and give you everything available, or at least all the good stuff; some only have a few uncompressed samples, and then some leave only slim pickings while the rest are completely inaccessible. Considering there's no other dedicated arcade tile viewer besides WinKawaks which only focuses on Capcom and NeoGeo games, it's a decent effort.
(download from ROMhacking.net)
PSicture is what everyone suggests when someone asks how to rip graphics from PlayStation games, but simply, it's not that great.
There are some games that work beautifully with it. Bomberman World, for example, has almost every sprite ripe for the picking. Final Fantasy Tactics apparently works great with it as well. The interface is also a treat to work with, as it's incredibly simple and the only thing you may need to tinker with is the palette.
However, for being what everything suggests for PlayStation ripping, no, it's not good. It's good for getting artwork from games, and there's the occasional goldmine, but so many games don't work with it, you're best off just trying to get to grips with Tile Molester and GGD.
(download from ROMhacking.net) (homepage)
There's only so much you can get from the files of a CD game; a lot of the good stuff is compressed, hidden, or simply stored in such a way that you can't get it without jumping through fifty hoops while reciting Shakespeare in European languages. Coincidentally, this is in Japanese! It also requires a humongous screen resolution, so me and my 800x600 resolution need to keep switching to a bigger one when using it, which is a mild irritation. 1152x864 seems to be the smallest resolution that lets you see everything.
Open it up, extract an ePSXe save state, drag it in and you're ready to go! The top half is dedicated to what's available, while the bottom half is there to try and view it in a more suited codec, but it doesn't work for everything. WASD scrolls through the graphics, pressing 9 lets you scroll through the palettes with the arrow keys, and holding Shift lets you move smaller spaces.
Much like the results of vSNES, some games are kinder than others; Nijiro Dodgeball showed the entire graphics for the playing teams in it's save states, but Slayers Royal only showed the very graphics shown on screen and nothing more. This Slayers game seems to be pretty kind, though I can't remember which one it is. Erm!
Now that you know how to rip sprites, here's some notes/bitchings from myself that attempt to steer you in the right way of how to use those skills.
Some people don't realise it, but 3D and 2D graphics are entirely different things! 2D graphics are what's been talked about for the whole thing and unless they're layered sprites, are stored so every frame of animation is viewable (layered sprites have them in pieces). 3D graphics just have the model itself saved and the animation data stored in such a way that it's probably kind of impossible to see unless you did a hell of a lot of reverse engineering. Or something. Don't quote me on that one!
In simpler terms, here's New Super Mario Bros.
Here we have Mario and a Goomba. Both appear 3D, but one is actually 2D. Confused?
Zooming in by a disgusting amount, we see that the Goomba is dithered, leaving grey spots on his edges and heavily blurred eyes, while Mario is relatively sharp with his blue eyes shining bright. That's because Mario is a 3D model, while the Goomba is just a sprite. It's all in prerendered graphics: A 3D model, positioned in frames and made into sprites either to save space (NSMB), to get past system limitations (Donkey Kong Country) or just to pretend to look cool even though it makes the art style look contrasting and ugly (Mario vs. Donkey Kong).
Mario, on the other hand, is 3D. He's stored in the DS 3D graphics file style, he isn't ugly and pixelated when enlarged (in-game, of course), and can essentially have unlimited animation. You could rip his graphics or any of the other 3D characters, but you could potentially do it forever, as there are all kinds of things to take in like angle, lighting and just about everything. Quite simply, sprite ripping should be kept to what are sprites, and 3D stuff should just be ripped by their models. It's only common sense!
Usually when I begin ripping graphics that are in high demand, people ask me how they can do it themselves. There's nothing wrong with this at all; as I've said before, knowledge is power, and remaining oblivious gets you nowhere. But the problem is, these folk see me as some kind of demigod of sprites, featuring eternal patience and an iron grip on these hand crafted tools to pluck the graphics from their mother's womb and organise them in the neatest way possible. But I'm just a guy who has no life. Big difference!
But since these people see me as being a wonder man, they presume that once they learn the tricks of the trade they can reach my level and do everything themselves. But, to use the word "but" way too much in this section, they start off with these tools that they've never used before, trying to get to grips with them while handling a complex game that's in high demand because the way it's sprites are stored is a digital representation of a bitch. As of this writing, I've received four requests of me teaching them how to rip from It's A Wonderful World, a game Dazz and I have been neglecting to work on simply because it's just so goddamned awkward. The designs of the characters are thin and wiry, meaning there are tiny, fiddly tiles to assemble and a lot of the pieces are stored far away from each other or in the wrong order, meaning you just have to try whatever and see if it fits. Combined with the plentiful, fiddly effects included in the files and general awkwardness of it all, this is not an ideal game for one new to tile ripping to start with.
Just as ripping sprites from gameplay generally involves starting off simple and then moving into the higher league, that's how I came to be where I am today. With less of a life.
As a simple exercise, try and piece together this little piggy from the often-requested game and see if you can get it all to look right. Without the game being emulated, it's kind of difficult to see if it's done correctly, nor can you just rip it from there to save yourself the time. And that's just the standing animation of the pig; there's still several more to assemble, and there's also the playable characters, who take advantage of all kinds of awkward poses and animations, wiry limbs flaying in every direction and the pieces to those just bunched together at the end of each animation, offering no indication of what goes where and why there's a small chunk of black left with no place to go. Is that what you want to get involved in?
See, that's why I shafted that exercise in mind desecrating and moved onto Luminous Arc. No tiles involved! Then that turned out to be a pain in the ass so now you can try it yourself!
Normally my advice for getting to grips with a program is simply "toy about with it until you get the hang of it," though naturally that doesn't exactly go down well. So using the main character of Luminous Arc as an example, let's see what you're made of!
When
you first open a file, the "Pixel/Bit" is set at 8Bit, which shouldn't be for
this game's graphics. Press the B key a few times until it cycles to 4Bit, or
4BPP as Tile Molester calls it, or 16-Bit graphics as SNES-era advertising
calls it.
Then stretch the canvas with the arrow keys until it looks fine. Thanks to how
the sprites are organised, you'll be doing this a lot with all sorts of things
in this particular, ranging from weapons to chunks of sleeves and tops of heads.
It becomes the worst part!
Click the palette window (if this isn't the first file you've opened, you'll
have to click the first tab and choose the third option and open the file you're
using for the graphics) and press PageDown until you're above a line of colours.
Press S until the "PalShiftMode" changes from 16Palette to 1Palette, and
PageDown some more until it's lined up and the graphics start looking like they
should.
And you're ready to rip! Just click the main window and use PageUp/PageDown to
scroll and just PrintScreen the stuff into Paint or whatever. Or use the second
option in the first tab to make a BMP of all that's visible. That's good for
stuff that isn't Luminous Arc and doesn't require you to change size
every two seconds, as you can simply stretch the window size with Shift + Down,
and then hold Down with no Shift until it's filled. Tada!
Of course, when there's something small and squished between frames, that's
likely to be a "piece" of the character or an accessory. That's where the arrow
keys are used to shrink the canvas again.
If it's a weapon or accessory, it's generally a separate palette, so click the
palette window again, make the PalShiftMode 16Palette again and press PageDown
once. Generally the palettes begin with the actual character and the one (or
ones) below are whatever that isn't the character. If that makes any sense.
And that's how you rip from Luminous Arc. Now you know why I barely touch the game.
Not exactly what you should follow, but a code of conduct I attempt to follow when I rip sprites and would probably help me hate you less if you followed them. I'm a cranky mothertrucker, see. =(
1 - rip as much as possible
Back in the olden type days, one could get away with ripping the eight directions and death animation of the title character in Bomberman Tournament and have it put up on a site, even though that barely scratched the surface as to how much animation there was untouched. Nowadays, we have AnimGet, several lacklustre attempts at save state archives and fancy graphics extractors, so there's really no excuse for such laziness aside from a way to start off.
[example: The Shyguy Kingdom has some ancient sheets that are really just a few random, unrelated rips littering an empty space. That could be accepted if it were from a game that's new and hard to emulate, but they're really not that great aside from being samplers.]
2 - keep it small
Since the dawn of sprite sheets, people have felt the need to bulk them up with oversized credit tags, unfunny comics that generally feature custom sprites by others that require the tag to be bulked out even more by crediting such and such a person for whatever it was they used, throwing in artwork or simply spacing the sprites miles away from each other. If I wanted a sprite comic or official artwork, I would look for a sprite comic or official artwork.
[example: I once saw a custom sheet of Pac-Man in his Pac-Man World design, and it was about 500x400 in size. However, it only had two frames for him, both about 32x32 in size. One of him normal, and another with no arms. The rest of the sheet was just a huge ass logo saying who it was, and an even bigger credit tag which was essentially a book about giving credit and what you should do and should not do. And to further make it worse, it was 25kb. If the author threw all that bullshit out the window, leaving only the crappy Pac-Man sprites and a super simple asking for credit, it could've shrunk down to 70x70, 1.5kb. Or he could've just done something better. (buuurn)]
3 - giving credit
Giving credit is one of those issues that gets brought up a lot and it only gives me more reason to stay out of spriting communities. On a majority of my sheets, I just say "ripped by Ragey" and leave it at that. If someone wants to thank me for my time getting them, that's swell, but if they don't then that's also swell, because it's really the graphics artist who should be getting the praise for doing them in the first place. Demanding that people build statues of you for ripping the rescued animals from the Sonic games, that's just low.
I admit that I stated a thanking would be appreciated on my Metal Slug: 2nd Mission sheets, as those did take a lot of time and patience from my side to finish them, so for somebody to use them and then claim as their own, that would piss me off quite a bit. As I said, the artist should be thanked if it was possible to find their name or whatever, but essentially taking one's time and claiming they put the effort into getting them, only by removing the credit tag (which I keep small both because I don't give a shit what you do with them (aside from claiming you did them) and also for the previous section's reason) and replacing it with their own.
It's a clunky and cumbersome argument that generally involves "hey how about just thank SEGA or whoever and the rippers just be ignored" at some point, which is also a decent answer. But, well, let's use an I-Mockery article as an example.
In Ol' #23, this kid paints the Mona Lisa on the ceiling of the bus. He didn't create the original Mona Lisa back in the 1500s, but he mimicked it pretty well and worked day and night on it, so he gets a round of applause. When a rowdy sports team spray soda all over it, he's mighty annoyed. Game artist makes sprites, sprites are compressed bizarrely yet someone rips them, and rips them good and comprehensively. Person gets internet applause. When a rowdy ne'er-do-well claims them as his own, person gets annoyed.
Except sprites aren't really seen as a level of art anywhere near the Mona Lisa, but I try to make a point.
4 - keep it tidy
I used to use lines to indicate when an animation had ended and a new one was starting, but I kind of gave up on that because it made reorganisation a severe hassle, so I just try and keep them close together, two pixels away from each other and all on the same line. If something's full of particles and whatnot, I try to space the ones beside it further away or sometimes put it in a differently coloured box, but in a nutshell, I just try to keep things tidy and not like those aforementioned sampler sheets.
5 - avoid repetition
Since I rip from the graphics data, I generally try to avoid reused frames unless it's part of a new animation, and I downright avoid getting sprites facing the other direction unless they're actually different, though yeah this isn't really a major one. The Retro Game Zone always have their sheets facing both directions, which really only helps people not use the rotate function in Paint and just bloats up the sheet unnecessarily.
So yeah, it's really what everyone should already know, but I feel it's worth mentioning.
I hope this helps in some way, as this is four hours of my life I'll never regain, not counting the time wasted trying to assist people in ripping sprites that end up in arguments still dragging on to this day.
Time is valuable. Do something fun.
