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Hacking moving from ds-x to acekard 2i and saves are not recognised

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slickochet

slickochet

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Hi guys. New to the forums here, but have been watching it a while. Ive looked around on here and many other sites but cannot seem to find a solution to this problem i'm having and have tried to no avail many different methods to solve it that other people said worked for them but dont work for me.

Ive recently bought an acekard 2i to replace my old ds-x which doesnt work with many new games anymore. and it all seems to be pretty good except that the acekard 2i will not recognise any of the old .sav files i have accumulated on my ds-x.

I am aware that the acekard 2i uses .nds.sav by default, but i have tried both options for that and .sav and it will not recognise either for any game. it always just makes a new save file and overwrites my old one.

I have tried every possible thing i can think of and that has been suggested on these and other forums including but not limited to:
  • ensuring the game and save names are identical
  • ensuring the cases are the same
  • ensuring all names are in lowercase
  • removing unusual characters from filenames (like - ( ) , etc)
  • changing the .sav files to .nds.sav
  • using rtoolds save manager to copy the save to the device
  • converting the save using the online save converter to the acekard 2 format and all sizes of the raw format
  • formatting the card with the panasonic formatter and reinstalling akaio
  • changing the .sav files to .SAV and back again
  • letting the acekard make a new save then replacing that with my old one
  • manually setting the roms save size
  • manually setting the roms save slot
and probably several other things that i've forgotten about that also didnt work.

im at the point of giving up and just cannot understand why it will not read these old saves when everyone else can get them to work no problem.

does anyone have any ideas? any help would be appreciated.

cheers

slick
 
thanks for the suggestion, but i already tried like 7 different types of target format from this tool (all the raw acekards and the acekard 2) and none of them worked sadly....
 
ive tried akaio and the official firmware. they both do the same thing and neither will load any of the saves
 
Are the ROMs and SAVs the same name? blahblah.nds/blahblah.sav, or blah.nds/blsh.nds.sav? Does it overwrite it or create another?
Are the SAVs and the AKs SAVs the same filesize? It should be an exponent, eg 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384... (thats all i remember)?
 
the names are exactly the same yeah.

the acekard 2i overwrites my old save and makes its own new empty one.

the saves are not the same size though. the ones made by the ds-x are trimmed down to the essential size only (10k or so) whereas the ones the acekard 2i makes are standard sizes like 512k, 256k etc.

however, i have already tried using the online save converter to convert my ds-x saves to these standard sizes and theyre still not recognised by the acekard...
 
@lolzed, yeah i have already tried it with those options. it still does not recognise the converted saves....

@macgeek, the most important ones would be tetris, brain training, hotel dusk and the phantom hourglass. i could deal with losing the rest as i dont use them much
 
everyone seems as baffled as this by i am....im at the point of just giving up and starting anew on this card.

any other suggestions before i do?
 
You're going to have to start over your games. Here's why.

You saves are insanely small so to convert them, Shuny's Converter will add space to the end of the SAV. AKAIO & Acekard FW looks for SAV info at the end of a SAV file and since there is only empty space, the SAV is corrupted. Sorry my friend but good upgrade choice(:

The reason may be wrong as my memory may be faulty, but I see no other suggestion then to restart your games D:

~ Jon
 
knob...thats not too good.

is there any way i could pad the saves out myself and put the data i have at the end and blank space at the beginning?
 
You'd have to be an experienced coder or asks someone that knows how to do that for you.

I wish you luck. Don't know any programs like that if that's what you were asking.

~ Jon
 
i found out that apparently ds-x saves are in a compressed format that the card compresses each time it saves and decompresses each time it reads. this would explain why it cannot be read by the acekard which is looking for a raw format save file.

it also seems to be a similar format to the .gz compressed file and can be changed to this filetype by just removing the first 24 bytes of the file and it can then be read and decompressed by winrar etc.

but....this only applies to saves made by the older firmwares (1.1.2 and below). i am on 1.1.3 and these ones seem to be of a different structure which cannot be read with this method and i have not been able to find out how these newer ones differ. it would also explain why none of the converters i have tried (including some japanese ones designed specifically for ds-x saves) work as they are all designed to work only with the older saves and not the newer ones.

i saw there was also a save converter put on the official ds-x forums, but as these no longer exist, i can no longer get it.

its a long shot, but does anyone have any idea how these 1.1.3 firmware saves are different from the older ones and how i could decompress them to a normal raw format that the acekard can read?

any ideas at all please. haha

cheers

slick
 

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