Ripping MSN emotes to your computer

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Aiden
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Ripping MSN emotes to your computer

Post by Aiden » Sat Jan 20, 2007 6:26 pm

Here is a guide I wrote that tells how to save custom emotes from MSN to your computer.
This is for saving the pictures to your computer to allow you to use them in other places than MSN.
4:40 PM 1/20/2007

Well, today I had the idea to send some of my custom emotes to a friend on myspace. I opened up a chat with someone and typed crackho - the shortcut to the emote I wanted to send. I right-clicked on it, hoping for a Save As, but there was none. So I go off to explorer to find out where MSN saves the custom emotes on your computer. After a little searching around, I find the folder to be:
C:\Documents and Settings\Dru Brown\Application Data\Microsoft\MSN Messenger

In this folder, I found a bunch of folders with nothing in them. Instead of looking through each one seperately, you can set your view to list and mouse over each in turn to view their size. Most of them are 0bytes in size, but you should find one bigger. For me, it was 2305832618, but it might not be the same for everyone. Inside this folder was the folder I was looking for: CustomEmoticons.

Inside this folder are my custom emoticons, in .dat form. All of mine started with TFR and had 3 digits after them. I right-clicked on one and clicked Open With Internet Explorer. This way, I could see the emotes. I navigated through the folder like this until I found the one I wanted, and right-clicked and clicked save-as. I got the error: "The system cannot find the file specified."

What the heck? It was right there! Oh well, I just copied the .dat file to my desktop and renamed it to crackho.gif. It worked fine, and I uploaded it to photobucket, and was finished.

Anyways, here's the short version of how to do it.
1. Navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\(your name here)\Application Data\Microsoft\MSN Messenger
2. Find the folder larger than 0bytes.
3. Open .dat files in the CustomEmoticons in your browser until you find the one you want to save.
4. Copy that file to your desktop and rename it giving it a new extension.
(If you cannot give new extensions by renaming, follow the steps at the end)

Keep in mind, this was on Windows XP using MSN Live Messenger.

To enable changing file types by renaming the files:
1. Go to your Control Panel
2. Click Folder Options and click the View tab.
3. Uncheck the box that says "Hide extensions for known file types"
4. Hit OK.
"When it takes forever to learn all the rules, no time is left for breaking them."

Username223
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Post by Username223 » Tue Mar 27, 2007 10:42 pm

nice :D

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