Clone and Repro Cart Problems

From Flash Cart DB
Revision as of 06:22, 3 February 2020 by Fcadmin (talk | contribs)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Problems with GB/GBA carts without a battery pre-installed

ES29LV160.jpg S29gl128-1.jpg

If your cart looks like this (no battery), if you flash a new game to it and try to save it will appear to have worked but once you power off, your save will be lost.


How it works

The way this cart functions is the rom is modified to write the save back to the flash chip when you save your game. When the game starts, the opposite occurs, the game extracts your save from the flash chip and puts it back on the SRAM so to the game it appears like everything is normal.


How can I extract my save file

Since the rom has been modified, all you need to do is dump the rom and run it in an emulator and your save file will be created. You will not be able to save again and if you re-load the rom in the emulator, your .sav file will be over written to the original save that is in the rom.


How to resolve the issue

You will need to install a battery or patch the rom you flash to also perform the above technique. At this time there are no programs that can automatically do that for you.


Problems with re-writing Pokemon games to GBA clone/repo carts

Pokemon games use a 1Mbit flash save type while almost all clone/repo carts use SRAM - 256Kbit, 512Kbit and some rare ones have 1Mbit. I believe that the Pokemon save file structure also contains a back up of the save file.

What you would need to do to make it work is:

- Use a 512Kbit or 1Mbit SRAM based clone/repo cart (for 1Mbit SRAM carts it is limited to 16MB)

- Understand the Pokemon save file structure

- Patch your intended rom to use SRAM instead of flash save (as far as we know there are no automated programs to do this)