Hacking EZ Flash Omega: Recover lost save?

Quick Man · Mar 7, 2019

Not sure what happened here. Had about 2 hours on Minish Cap. Following the save protocol correctly. Did a clean boot, saved my save, waited 5 seconds, then shut off. Turned the DSL on later and the save is gone. Ran check disc on my pc and it found no errors. I've saved multiple times on this game file without issue, until this point. Probably my 8th save or so...

Is there anything I can do to try and recover? I know its just a few hours of game time but would like to know how to troubleshoot when it happens again.

psicotron3 · Mar 7, 2019

You can check if there's a hidden system folder named FOUND. 000 on the root of the sdcard. Maybe windows scandisk recovered your file and this is where it will be stored.

Those save errors are really a problem and i think the omega won't be very reliable to play a long rpg such as golden sun. I'm begining to miss the "power cycle" save...

Taking out the sdcard, making a backup a puting it back again also isn't very easy...

kuwanger · Mar 8, 2019

I agree as well. Sadly the write-save-to-sd part of the EZ Omega is not open source, so there's no way for anyone like me to address the problem. For the most part Ez-Fflash2 has deflected such concerns noting that they've not had complaints from Chinese users. There was some discussion at some point about adding an auditory or visual indication when a save was complete, but official development seems to be mostly halted. If you want, you can add to EZ-Flash Omega test flight thread to further ask for some sort of work in this area.

What is clear to me is there's not enough consistent on SD writes to suggest that 5 seconds is 100% reliable. I don't think this is an SD quality issue, but that's incredibly difficult to actually nail down. Even having a test program that you could use to give you some idea of how long save writes can take at their worst would be incredibly helpful. The only real other advice I can give is if you ever do have problems with corruption, consider trying out another SD card (it may or may not help, I don't really know) and basically wait 5 seconds longer. So, yea, to be extra safe you might want to wait 10 or even 15 seconds if you've had issues in the past. If you keep having issues even at 30+ seconds (not sure if anyone has gone that far)? *sigh* Don't know what to say.

myuusmeow · Mar 24, 2019

psicotron3 said:
You can check if there's a hidden system folder named FOUND. 000 on the root of the sdcard. Maybe windows scandisk recovered your file and this is where it will be stored.

Those save errors are really a problem and i think the omega won't be very reliable to play a long rpg such as golden sun. I'm begining to miss the "power cycle" save...

Taking out the sdcard, making a backup a puting it back again also isn't very easy...

Do you know if there's a way to match the FILE0000.CHK files back to their original filenames? I've got 19 of them in a folder. Or am I gonna have to try and match each one myself with the ROM in VBA or something? Yikes, thanks for nothing EZ-Flash.

edit: so this seems to be working. I search http://offlinelistgba.free.fr/index.php <- that database to find each game's save size (it'll be like "Sram_v112" so google that, see a site says its 256kbit, divide by 8 = 32KB) and then with VBA and the ROM open, import each battery file of the corresponding filesize, reset the emu, and see if the save loads.

For Goomba saves, loading each into VBA didn't work. So this program: https://github.com/libertyernie/goombasav/releases goomba_cs.exe seems to work. I load each file and it checks the contents for save files.

All in all this was annoying as hell. Thanks EZ-Flash. If Everdrive ever releases a regular GBA sized flash card I'll never use this thing again, until then I guess dealing with this is the only way to get a flash card that fits flush in a GB Micro.

Hacking EZ Flash Omega: Recover lost save?

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