# Transfer emulator progress to gameboy advance cartridge



## Hockeydavid (Aug 23, 2018)

I am currently playing Pokemon Firered on an emulator(GPemu) on my computer. I want to transfer my progress to an actual Pokemon firered cartridge. I am  trying to use Rudolph's gba backup tool and I have a ds lite and an r4 card.  However, this method isn't working for me. Can anyone help me?


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## blackkawa (Sep 3, 2018)

Backup tools mostly read only, doesnt write on the chips ROM or memory. To make such a edit on the cartridge memory, you should use a adapter that lets you edit the contents on the cartridge


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## migles (Sep 3, 2018)

blackkawa said:


> Backup tools mostly read only, doesnt write on the chips ROM or memory.


not sure what you are trying to say, but you can restore a save using theese backup tools just fine.
they can read and write to the save data.



Hockeydavid said:


> I am currently playing Pokemon Firered on an emulator(GPemu) on my computer. I want to transfer my progress to an actual Pokemon firered cartridge. I am  trying to use Rudolph's gba backup tool and I have a ds lite and an r4 card.  However, this method isn't working for me. Can anyone help me?


can ya give more details on whats going on?
i will give some info meanwhile:

keep in mind, you need to import battery saves, if you are using save states, theese don't work.
make sure you are using a propper clean rom in the emulator.

firered and leafgreen have 2 revisions. i think i restore my save once from a 1.1 rom to a 1.0 cart just fine, but you may check on that
the firered revisions are easy to identify, Version 1.0 does not show "PRESENTS" on the Game Freak logo screen
but i dont think the revisions being different is the problem.

make sure your cart is an official one, if you are not sure, provide good quality pictures of the cart, in the back you can find 4 gold squares. theese are a very good indicative of being official, if you find plenty of tiny round dots, its a fake cart
rudolphs backup tools or similair may be unable to write or read from fake cartridges.

rudolphs backup tool will look for the files in specific folders, you might want to backup your save from the cart to create the folders.

the save you must restore should be a ".sav" with the size of: 128KB. if your emulator created something different, its probably a save state which you can't use with another cart or other emulators.


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## Hockeydavid (Sep 8, 2018)

My save file is (e26ee0d44e809351c8ce2d73c7400cdd.vba-next (2).sav) with a size of 717KB. is Is it a battery save or is it a save state? How do i tell? If it is a save state, can i convert it to a battery save? As for my cartridge, I believe it is fake because there are many gold circles on the back of the cartridge.


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## Ryccardo (Sep 8, 2018)

Hockeydavid said:


> My save file is (e26ee0d44e809351c8ce2d73c7400cdd.vba-next (2).sav) with a size of 717KB. is Is it a battery save or is it a save state? How do i tell? If it is a save state, can i convert it to a battery save? As for my cartridge, I believe it is fake because there are many gold circles on the back of the cartridge.


It should be a regular ("battery") save (VBA savestates, at least on the 2004 original VBA, are .sg? files), but likely with some header: there should be a file > export battery option in the emulator

The 1 megabit = 128 KB file size applies obviously to the original game; knockoffs (whether the physical version or the one you emulated) may have been hacked (usually poorly) to use a different, incompatible format


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## migles (Sep 8, 2018)

Hockeydavid said:


> My save file is (e26ee0d44e809351c8ce2d73c7400cdd.vba-next (2).sav) with a size of 717KB. is Is it a battery save or is it a save state? How do i tell? If it is a save state, can i convert it to a battery save? As for my cartridge, I believe it is fake because there are many gold circles on the back of the cartridge.


gold circles yeah very likely a fake, programs like rudolphs tool might have trouble to write too..

your save is weird, either way its its way to big.. of course rudolph or other tool won't be able to write it..
sadly i dont use chrome or that emulator to have a look at..

you need a way to extract the battery save.. have a look in other places, you might find the battery save..
since the save is named vba-next, have a look in this other emulator and see if you can open that save as a battery or save state


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## Hockeydavid (Sep 9, 2018)

I tried using visual boy advance. VBA recognizes my save file as a battery save file, but when I import my save file, it restarts the game and my progress isn't there. i suspect this happens because my save file is too big. Can I decrease the size, or copy it onto another save file with a smaller size?


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