Hello!
First off thanks for making these awesome plugins for the Retrode & the Retrode; all of my plugins arrived today :-)
I pulled out all of my old gameboy carts and began dumping my SRAM files before the battery finally gives out in these. I dumped 22 games and only had SRAM issues with two:
Final Fantasy Legend - GB NTSC/U - The SRAM file does not show up in the Retrode when the game is plugged in; only the ROM file shows. The ROM dumps and plays fine.
Conker's Pocket Tales - GBC NTSC/U - The SRAM file dumped seems to always be corrupt. When the game boots in an emulator, if the dumped save is loaded it displays a message that says "SAVED DATA IS NOT COMPATIBLE WITH HARDWARE IF YOU CONTINUE ALL DATA WILL BE ERASED".
The save is still fine on a real Gameboy. I made sure I cleaned the contacts and the ROM itself dumps fine, just the save is corrupted, so I'm pretty sure I had a good connection with the Retrode. I tried several different times just to be sure and consistently got that the ROM dumps fine, and the save is corrupted.
Other than that, all of my GB/GBC games dumped their ROMs and saves correctly :-) In fact, I was extremely happy when I dumped my Final Fantasy Legend III cart, because my save came with it - on a real gameboy, this save disappeared several years back and I thought the battery gave out and it was lost forever. It was pretty depressing when I discovered that and I never replayed it since then and just left it that way. To my surprise, when I dumped it with the Retrode - my save was there when I loaded up the emulator (not sure how that would technically work... but it happened).
That was really awesome and made my day. Thanks for all your hard work :-)
-SLK
My experiences were fairly similar, although we don't have any game overlaps that I can see. Most of my save games read correctly, except for:
Kid Icarus - Of Myths and Monsters
Kirby's Pinball Land
Kirby's Tilt 'n Tumble
All of which did not report any saveram. However, the saves are indeed still intact on my Gameboy.
For Conker's Pocket Tales: is that game one of the hybrid Gameboy/Gameboy colour carts? And is your emulator set for the same hardware type as you played it on originally? Warioland 2 will do this for me as well on hardware. If I play it on GBA/GBC, it's fine. But if I put the game into an original Gameboy or Super Gameboy, it gives a similar warning. You should try checking your emulator settings and/or seeing if you can remember which "mode" you played it in originally.
QuoteFor Conker's Pocket Tales: is that game one of the hybrid Gameboy/Gameboy colour carts? And is your emulator set for the same hardware type as you played it on originally? Warioland 2 will do this for me as well on hardware. If I play it on GBA/GBC, it's fine. But if I put the game into an original Gameboy or Super Gameboy, it gives a similar warning. You should try checking your emulator settings and/or seeing if you can remember which "mode" you played it in originally.
Oh wow - yep that's it - it is a hybrid cart. I was running No$GMB and it booted in its default SGB+CGB mode. If i changed it to just plain Color Gameboy mode it took it. I had only ever played that cart on Gameboy Color or Advance. Thanks for the tip!
I guess that means the only cart I actually had trouble with was the original Final Fantasy Legend.
Quote from: Zerker on 29/Mar/2013 08:44:38 PM
Kirby's Tilt 'n Tumble
That game uses EEPROM to save.
Some more information. At BFC's suggestion, I ran my collection through GameHeader and noticed that the type code for Kid Icarus and Kirby's Pinball land was different than any of the games which had working Saveram. See below for the relevant output:
Kid Icarus:
----| File Data |--------------------------------------------------
System: Nintendo Game Boy
File: Kid Icarus - of Myths and Monsters.gb
Path: D:\Backups\Gameboy
Compressed: No
Length: 131072 Bytes (1 Mbit)
CRC32: 0C042862
MD5: 23C7BE98 AC9A4D3B 046AD1BE 3F0965E4
SHA1: 465614BB 236C507A 5709ECAB 95827A8B E4E2E6B8
----| Header Data |------------------------------------------------
Entry Point: 0x0150C300
Logo Code: Ok
Title: KID ICARUS
New Licensee Code: N/A
SGB Support: 0x00 (No)
Cartridge Type: 0x06 (ROM + MBC2 + BATTERY)
ROM Size: 0x02 (Ok; 1 Mbit; 131072 Bytes)
RAM Size: 0x00 (None)
Old Licensee Code: 0x01 (Nintendo)
Version: 0x00 (v1.0)
Header Checksum: 0x1E (Ok)
Global Checksum: 0x52A4 (Ok)
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Kirby's Pinball Land
----| File Data |--------------------------------------------------
System: Nintendo Game Boy
File: Kirby's Pinball Land.gb
Path: D:\Backups\Gameboy
Compressed: No
Length: 262144 Bytes (2 Mbit)
CRC32: 31CB6526
MD5: F711ED10 307D4EA2 7223FE96 5595B123
SHA1: 06EFDB13 8FF56CD9 522DECE4 4ADADD3F AE169C76
----| Header Data |------------------------------------------------
Entry Point: 0x0150C300
Logo Code: Ok
Title: KIRBY'S PINBALL
New Licensee Code: N/A
SGB Support: 0x00 (No)
Cartridge Type: 0x06 (ROM + MBC2 + BATTERY)
ROM Size: 0x03 (Ok; 2 Mbit; 262144 Bytes)
RAM Size: 0x00 (None)
Old Licensee Code: 0x01 (Nintendo)
Version: 0x00 (v1.0)
Header Checksum: 0xBF (Ok)
Global Checksum: 0xF74B (Ok)
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Also, since I mentioned it above, here's the Kirby's Tilt 'n Tumble header:
----| File Data |--------------------------------------------------
System: Nintendo Game Boy
File: Kirby's Tilt 'n Tumble.gb
Path: D:\Backups\Gameboy
Compressed: No
Length: 1048576 Bytes (8 Mbit)
CRC32: E541ACF1
MD5: F2E24776 D9308236 2C9B435A BC167D89
SHA1: 6AB8D666 E2BEBBB3 FEE7796C 8968AAB2 EA21B8F9
----| Header Data |------------------------------------------------
Entry Point: 0x0150C300
Logo Code: Ok
Title: KIRBY TNT KTNEļ¾
New Licensee Code: 01 (Nintendo)
SGB Support: 0x00 (No)
Cartridge Type: 0x22 (Unknown)
ROM Size: 0x05 (Ok; 8 Mbit; 1048576 Bytes)
RAM Size: 0x00 (None)
Old Licensee Code: 0x33
Version: 0x00 (v1.0)
Header Checksum: 0xA2 (Ok)
Global Checksum: 0x5186 (Ok)
-------------------------------------------------------------------