PS1/2 Raw ps1 save to emulator

[Monkfish Esq]

Hi. I'm having a problem with FF8 on my playstation and I'm trying to get the raw save from my memory card to my PC. I found a thread of a guy with the exact same problem but I didn't want to necro a 4 year old thread so I'm making my own. I'll describe the problem quickly and the steps I've taken so far.

I'm on disk 3 and just at the point where I'm going to the Lunar Gate. As soon as I step into the gate the screen goes black to load the new area and then just stays black. The field music plays on loop in the background and nothing I've tried works. Swapping disks, popping the lid and holding down the button, turning it upside down. As soon as I try to go into the Lunar Gate it just goes to a black screen and doesn't come back.
So I tried extracting my raw save data. It's a US copy and a US save.

• Put my PS1 memory card in PS2
• Copy the raw save data onto a USB stick using ELF
• Open the raw save data in memcardrex 1.9
• It recognises the save file and my playtime
• Save the card as an .mcd
• Open it in duckstation
• Load the BIOS and the save is there and I'm able to copy/delete it just like I would on the real console
• load into the game and there's no save data found

I've tried it in epsxe as well and it shows in the BIOS that the data is there on the memory card but when I go into the game it doesn't load anything. These are the exact steps that they took in the thread I found here but for some reason mine just refuses to work and I'm out of ideas. The only thing I have left to try is maybe converting the save to EU then extracting the raw data and putting it back on my memory card and trying my sdi patched EU disk.

Any help or tips would be greatly appreciated because this has been annoying me for quite a while and I Just want to get it over with and get on with my playthrough. I'd rather not start the whole thing again because I don't even know if restarting on an EU copy would fix the issue.

Post automatically merged: Dec 30, 2022

Well now I have no idea because I just tried everything again and it worked

• Copy raw data from the better memory card this time
• copy it onto pc
• open in memcardrex
• save as .mcs
• open duckstation
• let duckstation create its own memory card
• open the memorycard editor and import the .mcs file into Final Fantasy VIII (USA) (Disc 3)_1.mcd
• boot the game and the save data appears

The Lunar Gate! Now I just have to save it and try to get the raw data back onto my memorycard. Memcardrex does have an option to save as raw so fingers crossed from this point.