Any way to transfer Earthbound saves from snes to Mother 1+2?

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Is there like a way to turn the earthbound save to that game? because i want to move my save game ti there.
 

FAST6191

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Yes, no and partially via other means is the answer.

Cross generational save conversion has been a thing in the past for actual remakes/ports (if it is emulated and the emulator supports savestates or some kind of internal saving with maybe only wrappers to consider then easy enough, this is not that though).

Yes in as much as it is theoretically possible and if you put the work in ultimately probably quite trivial.
No in as much as I doubt there is an existing tool or do this and this and... workflow to follow.
Partially via other means go look at cheats -- chances are you only care about the stats of the characters in your party* which combined with a lot of money cheat (not necessarily infinite but enough to restock the inventory, and inventory cheats are not hard if you have some rarer and harder to come by gear like possibly Poo's equipment or holy fry pan), some turbo button on an emulator and a hour or so (why fiddle around with names, favourite foods and whatever else when you can just enter them in via the game itself running at 600% speed) gets you back to something that you might recognise as the same game you had on the other system.
*which could even just be an experience value if the stats are derived from level rather than random or independent.

RPGs can also be more tricky here compared to something like a puzzle game, platformer or something as there might be world changes recorded in the save and you would want to sort/convert those as well (already spoken to this person, done this in game event, have visited this "room"/"level"...), though might be "oh look you have this key item/are above level/have visited this room therefore you must have done it". I doubt there will be too much in the way of randomly generated background stats (if you are familiar with pokemon then the pokemon trainer number is a good example of something that could trouble things)


If you go find a guide to cross regional save conversion then it is all the same problems, possibly just magnified.

The four things you care about for this are

Save hashing. Saves overwhelmingly do things with their data to ensure it has not been corrupted (also bonus of stopping alterations) and this can be quite custom, indeed I generally expect it for both the GBA and SNES. You get to figure this out, or maybe bypass it (easy enough to in this instance make the GBA ignore the results of a failure to match, and then next save it will probably sort it such that you can transfer back to a conventional version).

Data representation changes. Classically with region stuff then where Japanese might use 16 bit characters so as to fit a bunch of kanji in then English or whatever might well be 8 bit (256 max options without annoying swapping, which some Japanese stuff does) and thus both be different data/appear as random characters at best and probably crash this via that alone, possibly shuffle all data after the names forward or backward (10 characters each of 8 bit is less data than 10 of 16) for however many characters and instances in the save.

Additions and removals. New items in the shop for the new version, things cut by the censor, things cut by the gameplay refiner... and that is just inventory. It can also be more subtle and where the SNES version possibly had to pack it all in (you are paying good money for this save chip after all) then by the GBA it could afford to be more liberal with the data and not have to regenerate it (the experience level dictating stats vs just copy all the stats from memory to and fro as you have memory to spare -- Sram v112 - 256 kbit it seems which is not the largest but still several times larger than the SNES ones I grabbed to compare to).

Lengths and padding. Alluded to above but is very much its own category in cross region stuff and even more likely here (handling 32 bit numbers on the SNES is doable but annoying, on the GBA it is standard where 16 bit stuff is doable but you might still want to think about it for some purposes so instead just use the space, even more so if 8 bit values are used). Start changing the locations (never mind relative locations in the list or reference value some items might have -- for inventory stuff you can either change location in a table as in byte ?? contains this item where ??+2 contains the next or have a value to indicate what it is and then a count for them. For most cross region stuff this is not so bad and I would be surprised if it changed here, nice test might be compare item cheats for each game and the values used, but there are always the annoyances and potential for them) and things that expect fixed locations within a file break very quickly.

All this potentially adds up to thousands of changes, though if you knew what each one was then something you could trivially convert in just about any programming language in probably less time than it takes you to click file - open - this save file, choose where to save as...

Assuming you are not going for the cheat approach (do really consider it) you would typically start new saves in each, figure out the basic structure, figure out some of the data locations (save editing is much like cheat making in that you get multiple versions with small changes between them and with enough points of comparison you find what contains what and how it is stored, https://web.archive.org/web/20080309104350/http://etk.scener.org/?op=tutorial https://doc.kodewerx.org/hacking_gba.html if you wanted a primer on such things and even better for the GBA in this case, with the major annoyance being the hash) and then repeat for later game saves. That should give you enough grounding to do things, maybe enough for a "good enough" conversion you can refine as time goes on and care about additional features or use cheats on the GBA to restore what you need (if it is for your personal use rather than a here is a tool for J Random Emulator User then you don't need to be as precise). However it is still going to be a serious project even if you are already a skilled hacker unless you get really lucky and find it similar (very much doubt you will) and if it is a one off thing then cheats + turbo is by far the better use of time. Speaking of time then if you want you can use cheats to knock that up a bit so you don't have an effectively a speedrun time in the save clock, assuming holding down turbo and idling somewhere does not do the same trick, same for battles count and whatever else that some neurosis/OCD tendency might demand.
Similarly if there is an existing save editor for one or both you might get some useful info there, and further shortcuts to recreation.
 

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