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SAMUS'S TUTORIAL PAGE
GETTING STARTED
The first step in creating a background is getting your image files. If you want to rip a background, you must use an 'emulator'. An emulator is basically a computer program that can play console or arcade games on your computer, there are also emulators for other computers. An emulator won't do anything on it's own, you need a ROM image of the software or game for it to work. The legality of emulators and roms are still being discussed today, but basically under copyright laws you are able to make 1 backup copy of your purchased game, book, tape, cd, movie, ect...
The emulators that I recommend are Project64 (n64), FinalBurn (CPS-2 arcade games), ZSNES (snes), GENESYST (genesis), NESTICLE (nes), and MAME (arcade). Each emulator has it's own way of deleting the layers and capturing a picture. For example, with ZSNES the 1 - 6 keys disable or enable a background or the sprites, from there you then hit the 'F1' key to bring up the pop up menu, where you can choose 'SAVE SNAPSHOT'. Depending on what color depth you have your settings on it will save as either a .pcx (8bit) or .bmp (16bit). With UltraHLE just hit the 'F10' key and it will save a snapshot in the targa format. With CALLUS, GENESYST, and NESTICLE, on the menu if you choose SETTINGS then LAYERS, you can disable whatever layer you want. Then hit 'F9' to save the .pcx. Also a good tip when you want to create multiple layers of backgrounds, try only activating one layer at a time, then take a snapshot. That way it is much easier later.
After capturing all of the needed background(s), the next step is to move them into a folder in you MUGEN directory. Elecbyte suggests a mugen\work\stages\backgroundname folder but you can use whatever your preference is. Now that you've collected all of your files that you are going to be working with, you are now ready to move on to the next step.