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Hacking 3-in-1+AKAIO saving

  • Thread starter Thread starter gotchaff
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SRAM = Save data.
PSRAM = fast writing memory to save GBA ROM, will erase when you turn the DS off.
NOR = slow writing memory to save GBA ROM, won't erase when DS is turned off.
 
Another World said:
you have to flash to psram each time you want to use it, as it doesn't store whats there. so if you flash 1 psram game, turn off the ds, that psram game is no longer there. to play that same game again, or another, you need to flash it over again. if you flash to nor the game will stay. its because nor is non-voltile and won't erase itself. it also takes much longer to flash to nor. the nor uses the battery. the sram (as rudolphs tools readme states) has two sections. one for the psram and one for nor. when you flash any game to psram or nor without backing up the save you will lose it, as a new save is created for that newly flashed game. this is why akaio has built in prompting to back up your saves on bootup. for more information check the "links" section of the akaio wiki. i put in a link to the 3in1 wiki.

so anyways,
you play a game for 5min, save it and turn off the ds.
you then turn on the ds, and flash the same game to psram again (to play it again.)
if you didn't back up the save, the 3in1 assumes thats a fresh flash (as does akaio) and the save in sram associated with the psram game is overwritten.

you play a game in nor for 5min and save, then turn off the ds.
turn it back on, that nor game remains as does the save because its stored by the 3volt battery.
the next time you flash a game larger than 16mb to nor it will overwrite that save.
now flash the original game back to nor, if you didn't back up the save you can't reload it. as whats sitting in the sram for nor is for the 2nd game.

does that make sense?

-another world
Click to expand...

Ah...

So should I use NOR or PSRAM? (which do you prefer)
 
psram is for any rom 16mb or less, nor is for any rom up to 32mb. if i'm playing a game smaller than 16 i tend to flash it each time i want to play it and back up my saves on reboot. i usually keep a build of dsheretic in my nor and run it via pass me.

-another world
 
I'll need to remember that...

A quick AKAIO suggestion - automatic choosing between psram and nor? (AKAIO finds size of rom)
 
I just dumped my sram, and there appears to be several different saves on it. Is this normal? One appears to be FZero Advance, which I have never had on my 3 in 1. Another is Harvest Moon MfomT, and the last is Mother 3. The last two I have played recently.


If its all of the extra data on the sram thats messing things up, couldn't you just add a feature to erase all the extra saves? Sort of like the dump sram and erase nor features. Or is that even possible?
 
Briankealing said:
Ah!
tongue.gif


That's mighty convenient.
Click to expand...
Not more than asking someone to read to you something that's already written at some wiki linked at some topic fixed at the top of this section
tongue.gif
First read the wiki, and only then you can suggest something new.

And there is no person better than you do decide "should I flash this little game to NOR or play it on PSRAM?" Since bigger games will be automatically be flashed to NOR
wink.gif
 
I use AKAIO 1.2(and older) and never had problems with GBA even with its saves

Does dual slot doesn't work with AKAIO 1.2?
Was the patch(for pokemon) since 1.3 really needed? Mine's working since I got my AK2 and 3in1 and that was last June last year
 
I have the latest of course, I just load up AKAIO 1.2 whenever I play GBA, just place a copy of it in the root or somewhere. The official firmware has the same method but I wouldn't use that
That's why I particularly said 1.2
 
It's just my perspective anyway
I actually like to play my 3in1 as a standalone GBA game in the GBA itself, the new optimizations causes the save in the 3in1 to be overwritten when I choose it from the GUI, thus puts my save while in GBA to the trash can. But I'm not saying that it's bad, not at all
Oh yeah, I'm using DS phat and a GBA sized 3in1
 
Akothegreat said:
I actually like to play my 3in1 as a standalone GBA game in the GBA itself, the new optimizations causes the save in the 3in1 to be overwritten when I choose it from the GUI, thus puts my save while in GBA to the trash can. But I'm not saying that it's bad, not at all
Click to expand...

if your in your gba (gba, gba micro) how are you using a gui?

if your using your 3in1 as standalone in your ndsp then you are using nor and the battery to store your save file. why would you boot to akaio first? just run the gba pack from the ds menu. when you flash over a new game to psram/nor the corresponding section of sram is overwritten so that the new game can save. if you don't flash anything the only save which is lost is your psram save. in which case you would set akaio to 'prompt' so that you can back up the save on reboot. if you then flash a new game, or the same game to psram, you have the save file which you can always put back on. if you are using nor, which it sounds like you are, none of this matters. i boot from within akaio all the time and run my nor games, simply hitting the "gba" icon on the top level menu (hit B until you get there). nothing is overwritten. if/when it prompts you to load an old save just click "no" and go on using the save stored by the battery.

i am now more confused as to what you are doing, both from your choice of older firmware and your method of running gba.

-another world
 
Wow... four pages of ezflash 3 in 1 stuff!

I got my 3 in 1 today - it works as normal.

The GBA boot time is slower than nds boot time, but that's most likely because of the memory flashing and stuff.
 
Another World said:
Akothegreat said:
I actually like to play my 3in1 as a standalone GBA game in the GBA itself, the new optimizations causes the save in the 3in1 to be overwritten when I choose it from the GUI, thus puts my save while in GBA to the trash can. But I'm not saying that it's bad, not at all
Click to expand...

if your in your gba (gba, gba micro) how are you using a gui?

if your using your 3in1 as standalone in your ndsp then you are using nor and the battery to store your save file. why would you boot to akaio first? just run the gba pack from the ds menu. when you flash over a new game to psram/nor the corresponding section of sram is overwritten so that the new game can save. if you don't flash anything the only save which is lost is your psram save. in which case you would set akaio to 'prompt' so that you can back up the save on reboot. if you then flash a new game, or the same game to psram, you have the save file which you can always put back on. if you are using nor, which it sounds like you are, none of this matters. i boot from within akaio all the time and run my nor games, simply hitting the "gba" icon on the top level menu (hit B until you get there). nothing is overwritten. if/when it prompts you to load an old save just click "no" and go on using the save stored by the battery.

i am now more confused as to what you are doing, both from your choice of older firmware and your method of running gba.

-another world
Click to expand...
The gui when I return the 3in1 back to the DS, to choose a new game to flash

yes, i'm using nor. i boot to akaio whenever i flash new games, not play. i play in my sp so it saves with its battery. i dont put akaio to 'prompt' but leaves 'back up at start up' to enabled, so i backs up the save without asking. hitting the 'gba' icon on the top level menu checks if i want to load or not, but i didn't put it to prompt so it automatically selects 'yes'. turning on the prompt and selecting 'no' causes it to... well a new game(this one doesn't load a save so it must be a new game). the 'back up on start up' is not always on start up, even if its enabled, it first checks if 'gba' was the last game played only then the back up occurs. and since i played in my sp, akaio had no idea that it was played and saved, thus not backing up
I suppose that no one else do this... T_T

and i still don't know what kind of patch was implemented last akaio 1.3, just curious
 
i think i understand what your doing now. that nor save would be in the battery backed-up section of sram regardless of what gba you play it on. when it comes time to flash a new nor game you shouldn't lose the save because akaio stores the path of the last nor rom you flashed over. the path is in the globalsettings.ini. i suppose if you did lose this info you could add it by hand and *trick* akaio into backing up your save on bootup. if the same nor game is there, akaio would just assume the attached save needs to be dumped, and not care if that save is weeks or months old. you don't have the options to back up saves when you want like with gba exploader but you do have the option to dump the entire sram. of course this will hold the data for your psram and nor save banks. loading the entire sram back would probably cause more issues, something i should add i haven't fully toyed with and/or debugged yet.

does that help at all? try messing with that line in the globalsettings. i know its an annoyance but i'm curious if that would fix your problem.

-another world
 
interesting, here's my global settings.ini
Code: 
[system]
brightness = 1
language = 0
langDirectory = lang_en/
uiName = DS Menu
fileListType = 0
romTrim = 1
showHiddenFiles = 0
enterLastDirWhenBootÂÂÂÂ= 0
downloadPlayPatchÂÂÂÂÂÂ = 0
cheatingSystem = 1
resetInGame = 1
hiddenFileNamesÂÂÂÂÂÂÂÂÂÂÂÂ= __aio,dsdsr,akmenu4.nds,snemul.cfg,nes,snes,lameboy,moonshl,svsip
Shortcut = 1
ShortcutPath = fat1:/NDS/MONOPO~1.NDS
ShortcutStr = Monopoly, Boggle, Yatzee, Battleship.nds
ShortcutLongPath = fat1:/NDS/Monopoly, Boggle, Yatzee, Battleship.nds
scrollSpeed = medium
norMode3in1Exp = 0
rumbleStrength = 0
autorunWithLastRom = 0
romNameTypeInList = 1
hideExtension = 1
slot2BootMode = 0
cheatsDB = fat0:/__aio/cheats/Fade.xml
gbaAutoSave = 1
SlowMotion = 0
useFAS1 = 0
viewMode = iconnoext
deleteSAVtoo = 0
copySAVtoo = 0
internalTXT = 0
showWhatsNew = 1
DATorXML = 6
saveExt = 0
scrollingCheats = 1
gbaSleepHack = 1
gbaSavePrompt = 0
GBASavedPSram = 0
GBASavedNOR = 1
GBALoadedPSramTitle =
GBALoadedNORTitle = fat1:/GBA/Pokémon Sapphire.gba
listviewmode = 1
GBALoadedPSramTitle =
GBALoadedPSramTitle =
notice that I have 3 "GBALoadedPSramTitle" which are pointed to null, why is that?
and how do i *trick* akaio to back up my save?
'dump sram' creates a sav file which is 512KB, but GBA saves are not that big. if psram and nor games are combined, how do i separate them?
 
Well, I've gotten AKAIO to halfway work with GBA games. I had maybe 10 blank entries of "GBALoadedPSramTitle =" in my globalsettings. So i just deleted my glogalsettings and let it make a new one. I'm not sure that really did anything, but replacing my roms seems to have. I guess they weren't "clean". But the saves load now. They work.. I can SEE the saves, which is more then I could say before. But now I just keep getting "Save is Corrupt" within the games. Games like Drill Dozer work. But only because it seems to keep a backup the save, and restores it. Summon Night: Swordcraft Story 2 gives the "Currupt" error. But Swordcraft story 1 doesn't seem too. And Harvest Moon: More friends of mineral town still says "there is no save". (Still keep in mind these work with exploader.)


I tried patching Swordcraft Story 2 with GBATA and an older ez4 client i had on my HD, but neither helped at all. They didn't seem to do anything.


Should we even bother posting this anymore? I get the feeling no one really cares if a couple of people have problems.
 

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