Hacking Akaio SRAM dump

[nowise]

I have been searching these forums for the better part of a day... forgive me I just need confirmation of what I think I have found:

I was about 8 hours into Mother 3 when I thought it might be a good idea to backup my saves. I went into the 3in1 menu and selected "Dump SRAM" which created a timestamped 512k file. This file appears to be useless and it also seems that my save games are gone. I cannot import this SRAM file back into the 3in1 with Akaio or with Exploader. My searching has indicated that the "Dump SRAM" button is for diagnostic purposes and shouldn't have been used. Please confirm that I am indeed screwed before I waste any more time with this.

Setup:
DS Lite
Acekard 2.1
Ezflash 3in1+

 

[Another World]

the sram stores the saves for the psram and nor. when you dump the sram you get a copy of everything currently in there into that back-up file. from what smiths told me, it is used for debugging purposes and is not useful at all for the avg. user. your normal mother.sav should be on the card, dumping the sram would not have overwritten it.

you *might* be able to load that sram dump using gba exploader, however, the akaio dump might have a header in it that gba exploader does not recognize. i'm only saying this because i sort of remember that you can dump the contents of the sram and load them again using gba exploader. i haven't used that homebrew for over a year, so my thoughts on the subject are a bit fuzzy.

-another world

 

[Da-Bomb1]

Well, I just use the GBA backup tool to backup my saves...it works fine, but you have to manually replace the old ones if you want to use them again.

 

[Smiths]

huh? dump sram does a force sram dump from the card of whatever is in it.
the auto dumping works better but sometimes you wanna force it out
you seen the data in the manual dump?

it does the entire SRAM, so perhaps the save is only for the first 64KB?

i dunno.

i drink

 

[cory1492]

Smiths drink? NO WAY!!!

nowise, your save file will be found in there starting from offset 65536bytes and will be either 65536bytes or 2*65536bytes long if you are inclined to hex edit and extract it yourself.

That said,
3in1_sramWrite.zip
read the readme and feel free to be the first person to test this modification of my full sram dump code that I use for testing assembly that uses 3in1 SRAM to stow results. I personally just use gbaldr as it allows me to dump/write save data at will, including the important save area bits from a full 512k dumps (and you could too if you were so inclined, but you'd lose your AIO auto save backup support.)

All else failing, feel free to toss me a link via PM and I'll see if I can extract just the save data for you.