Once you have unlz-gba, open it. Everything should be straight-forward. Click on the button "OpenFile" and choose your GBA game file. It will say "Looking for LZ77 Compressed data. This might take a while". Press OK and wait a while (usually about a minute or two). This is what it should look like:
This table shows which images can be found through unlz-gba. Blank means you access them through a tile editor.
| Mini portraits |
Portraits |
Mouth frames |
|
| FE6 |
Yes |
Yes |
|
| FE7 Japanese |
Yes |
||
| FE7 English |
Yes |
Yes |
|
| FE8 Japanese |
Yes |
||
| FE8 English |
Yes |
Firstly, here are a few notes. Don't forget portraits are stored backwards! (eg. The last portrait is Eliwood.)
English FE7
1334~1339 NPC portraits
1340~1372 Class portraits
1373~1467 NPC~Enemy portraits
1468~1536 Playable character portraits
2178~2343 Mini portraits
END
Here I'll show how to basically import a portrait in. I'll use Eliwood as an example.
Since it's not properly aligned, I'll press "+" until it looks like this:
Then I'll press "Save as..." to save the image as a .png file. Next I should sort out the custom portrait I want to replace Eliwood with. Here is how my custom portrait should look and be aligned:
After deciding a palette for my portrait, I'll recolour it to black & white.
My portrait's palette only has 5 colours (including BG colour). Once I've recoloured it, I should copy the portrait, open my saved .png file of Eliwood, paste it in and save it. However, I haven't done the blinking frames for my portrait so it will still have Eliwood's for now. Then I can import it in.
I imported my portrait, and pressed "Write to Rom". The above image should show the default options, you don't need to tick or untick any other boxes. You should especially keep the top right box ticked. Press "OK" and it should have worked. If your portrait was larger than the original one, then it will show an error message like this:
Unticking the "Auto abort if new data is bigger" box will fix the error message, but it overwrites the data after the portrait (which is the usually the next portrait). For example, you could have replaced Pent with a portrait that was too big, and thus Nino's portrait will be messed up. To properly fix this problem, you could expand the data in the game, and unlz-gba will help you repoint the data. You can find detailed instructions for doing this on other sites. If you don't want to do that, then you'll have to somehow make your portrait smaller by removing rows of pixels from your portrait/moving your portrait down. Do this to your original normal portrait where it's properly aligned, and then you'll have to rearrange it again to the one ingame. (This is especially annoying when you have figured out your eye/mouth frames, and have to fix them because your moved your portrait down.)
Next I should sort out the palette, where instructions are in this tutorial. I'll also need to replace the mini portrait, which is just the same idea as replacing the main portrait, but much easier.