The tool's editors change a picture and a body that came out of a cartridge. This page is the other way in. An image from anywhere — a photograph, a drawing, something you found — becomes a texture; a wrestler the tool handed over as a file stands up here as the same figure. Both are painted and turned by the same code the tool uses. Nothing is uploaded, and nothing here needs a dump: the image is decoded by your browser, in this tab.

Two ways in

Texture takes an image and holds it to the colours an AKI texture has room for. A cartridge texture in this family is not a picture of colours: it is a list of indices and a palette they name, and there is room for sixteen colours in CI4 and two hundred and fifty-six in CI8. A photograph has thousands, so the page counts the colours, keeps the ones that cover the most pixels, and points every other pixel at the nearest one it kept. What comes out is the TEX block a cartridge stores, and dropping that file back in opens it again.

Wrestler takes a file the tool's Models view writes with one button — the twenty parts of one wrestler, with the palettes and the pictures they are drawn through — and assembles them into the same standing figure, which can be turned, tilted and taken away as the same file again. What is not in that file is everything else a cartridge has: the roster record, the costume, the moveset, the parameters. Twenty parts and the two set numbers behind them is what a body is, and it is enough to draw one.

Choose one of the twenty parts and it opens below in the texture editor, on the two files a part is: eight bytes of tile header and then the pixels, with the palette a file of its own. Painting one paints a palette file rather than a part — the game's tables pair one palette with several parts, so a colour changed on a boot changes on every part that names the same palette, and the panel says how many that is before you touch it. The four bytes of a tile's header this build has not settled are carried through untouched.

Why a palette is the whole job

An image that has few enough colours of its own comes through with nothing lost, and the page says so: every colour of its own kept exactly. One that does not says how many of its colours had to move, because a number you can see is better than a picture that looks slightly wrong for a reason you cannot.

Transparency is a palette entry here rather than a property of a pixel, which is how these cartridges store it: an erased pixel is a pixel whose index names entry zero, and entry zero's alpha bit is clear. The distance between two colours is measured the way the hardware sees it, in the five bits a channel the format holds — two colours that differ below that are the same colour, and comparing the eight-bit values would separate pixels the cartridge cannot tell apart.

What is not here

• No cartridge is written. This page has none, so what it hands back is the texture block and the wrestler file themselves; the tool is where those are written into a dump.
• The moveset editor is not here. A moveset's meaning comes from the tables a cartridge holds — which move each slot names, what damage it does — so a file without those tables would be a picture of numbers rather than a moveset, and there is nothing to edit yet.
• No tile is made from nothing. A part's tile can be painted and written back, but the four bytes of a tile's header this build has not settled are carried through rather than chosen, so a new tile is not something this page can invent.