Sonic Advance/Animation Format

It has been proposed that Sonic Advance/Animation Format be renamed and moved to a new page. Reason for proposal: The main page has been moved to Sonic Advance/Technical information

The Sonic Advance animation format consists primarily of five pointers, in the following order:

• Palette, Tile, and Animation data
• Mapping Frames data
• Sprite Attribute data
• Sprite palettes
• Sprite tiles

Sonic Advance 2 has one additional pointer of unknown purpose, and Sonic Advance 3 has two additional unknown pointers.
The first three sections all begin with a list of pointers with length equal to the number of animations in the game (see below).

Locations

Name	Code	Address	Animation Count (dec.)
Sonic Advance US	ASOE	D868C	906
Sonic Advance 2 US	A2NE	F40D4	1133
Sonic Advance 3 US	B3SE	3314F0	1524

Palette, Tile, and Animation data

Each animation's data begins with a list of pointers "sub-animations". I do not know how multiple sub-animations are used or how the game knows the number of sub-animations in each animation.
Each sub-animation begins with the following sequence of 32-bit integers:

• -2 (probably a data type indicator)
• The index in the sprite palettes to begin copying from
• The number of entries to copy into the GBA's sprite palette
• -1 (probably a data type indicator)
• The index in the sprite tiles to begin copying from
• The number of tiles to copy into the GBA's VRAM
• -6 (probably a data type indicator)
• An array of the following structure:

Offset	Description
0	The index in the sprite tiles to begin copying from
4	The number of tiles to copy into the GBA's VRAM
8	The time to display the frame (0..128)
C	An index to the mapping frames data array
10	Some kind of flag, possible values include: -1: Normal -3: End of animation, followed by some unknown value -4: End of animation

The tile data in the first frame seems to be ignored in favor of the data in the header. Instead, the "number of tiles to copy" contains some weird value like 0x1006F0FA.

Mapping Frames data

Each animation's data consists of an array of the following structure of 16-bit integers, the length of which can be deduced from the indexes used by the Palette, Tile, and Animation data:

Offset	Description
0	An index to the sprite attribute data array
4	The number of sprites in the frame
8	Probably the frame's width, doesn't seem to do anything
C	Probably the frame's height, doesn't seem to do anything
10	X offset of frame relative to object's position
14	Y offset of frame relative to object's position

Sprite Attribute data

Each animation's data consists of an array of the following structure of 16-bit integers, the length of which can be deduced from the indexes used by the Mapping Frames data:

Offset	Description
0	Attribute 0
2	Attribute 1
4	Attribute 2

For more information on the attributes, see this document.