In my investigations into the structure of .spr files, although I found that extracting the individual frames in order to edit them by hand is too big a job, I have discovered that there is a lot of fun to be had from swapping them around, and indeed that's what I did when I made my "freedom fishbowl" etc. For instance...

Case skinz creators, haven't you always been irritated by the way you make the perfect, subtle case -- and then find that it's got that brash yellow and red door on it? Well, you can change all that now!

I'm not going to give you a download for this, because if I did it would be nearly 30 megabytes big. But I'm going to tell you how to fiddle around with your game to get results such as these:

or this one, which is good fun because the door actually works but doesn't mess up the case skin:

In all of these, the pet will come out of the place where you see the sprite, and to put it away you must put it there instead of in the usual place. Also if you minimise the case, the sprite will still be visible, but you can wipe it out by moving a pet or something over it.

You want to know more? Are you insane? Okay then, read on. There are two ways of doing this; the first makes use of ResHacker's ability to replace items. Simply open the Petz 5 Rez.dll into Reshacker and choose Action and "Save SPR resources". A whole bunch of spr files will then be unpacked onto your hard drive with names like Data_1.bin, along with a little text file which tells you which one should have which spr name. Now pick one which sounds like fun and replace the Casedoor SPR with it.

The second method is the one I use; it takes all those 78 SPR files (you can extract them with Reshacker or by hand in a hex editor, it's your choice) and puts them into directories on your hard drive, so that you can swap them around until you go dizzy. Yes, you might crash your game -- but us mad scientists don't mind things like that, do we? Actually I've not crashed the game yet by doing this, and it's good fun. First off, you've got to alter one byte in the Petz 5 Rez.dll so that it will look on your hard drive for the files instead of inside the .dll. Here's what you want to change:


of it might look like this in your particular Petz 5 Rez.dll file:


Just alter that highlighted letter to any other letter. Next, you need to give all of those 78 files the correct names, which you will find in a list at the bottom of this page.
The directories that they must go into will probably have to be created by you; off the main petz 5 game directory you need to have one called art, and then off that one called sprites, then off that you will need seven directories -- adpt, case, foot, hart, hole, minigames, and weather. It should be reasonably logical as to which ones go in which directory, but if you get it wrong there's no big problem, the game will simply tell you what's missing and close. Just put whatever it wants wherever it wants, and all will be well.

If it asks for a .scp file, then download this small file and unpack it into your game's main directory. The files should all go into the correct place, off a directory called ptzfiles. So, here's where everything should be (screengrab is from my Windows Explorer):


And there you are! You can rename Casedoor.spr and then copy various of the .spr files into your "case" directory and try them out, renaming each one in turn to Casedoor.spr.

Enjoy!

Carolyn Horn