Hacking R4 Save Dongle and Gateway Red Card???

[Quicksilver88]

I am wondering if someone who has an R4 save dongle and a gateway could test something.....

I want to see if it is possible to 'transfer' a save from a purchased cart to the gateway. In theory if the gateway is using the exact same save 'hardware' as an official cart this should work.

1. Backup the save file of a game you own with the r4 dongle
2. Plug the red gateway 3DS card into your save dongle and see if it will let you restore said game file.
3. Put a rom of the game on the gateway
4. Make sure their is no .sav file for the rom already on your 3DS SD card (as it will reload this file if it is present overwriting your dongle transfered save).
5. Launch the game with the gateway and see if your save data is present.
6. Exit the game with home/close and see if the gateway properly creates the .sav file on the 3DS SD card.


The reasons for testing this are obvious which is many of us have retail carts we may want to be able to transfer the save game files to the gateway so we can sell/trade/give away our retail carts. I myself have more than a dozen 3DS games and am done playing most of them and would like to get rid of them but would like to know if I want to revist them at some point on the gateway that I could use my save game file.

Devin said he looked at a gateway .sav file and a r4 dongle save file and they were not the same. R4 has a tool on their site that supposedly decrytps save files so I am wondering if that could be of any use.

I am not a coder but maybe someone on the scene can compare the save files and create some type of conversion tool that would let us convert gateway to r4 saves and vice versa.

If someone can verify or refute this funcationality that would be helpful, but I will likely just buy an r4 dongle myself next month and test it and even if it doesn't work hopefully someone will create a save converter program in the future.

 

[Saturosias]

I remember reading that saves created with the save dongle were incompatible with the Gateway's saving method.

 

[Quicksilver88]

I remember reading that saves created with the save dongle were incompatible with the Gateway's saving method.

Well its not that the saves are not compatible...Devin looked into that, its if the r4i dongle can read/write the gateway card itseld not deal with the .sav files the gateway card creates on the 3DS card......In theory it may work, but only if the gateway red card is using the same save eeprom and adressing it the same as a standard cart does (which would make sense).

 

[Quicksilver88]

Good advice!Let me try

Let me know what your findings are...It would really be great if this worked so we could transfer those original saves to the gateway for later play!

 

[aliak11]

You are able to dump the save off of the Gateway but you get an error if you try to write a save to it.

 

[Quicksilver88]

You are able to dump the save off of the Gateway but you get an error if you try to write a save to it.

Thank you for verify that for me as you are the first person to give me any meaninful feedback....I am guessing this has something to do with the fact that the gateway doesn't present it's unique catridge ID the same way that a regular game cart does.

Its a bummer as it looks like for now there is no way to transfer save games from a retail cart to the gateway. If you have a r4i save dongle, can you tell me this.....how can you even use another users save game file from one retail cart to another when Nintendo changed the save encryption scheme sometime late in 2011 and no one has worked out a new decrypt/encrypt program? Is that the fact in that basically the r4 save dongle is only useful for backing up and restoring your own game saves to the same cartridge?