Hardware Bought a physical copy of Pokemon ShinyGold, can't back up save file?

[SonicRings]

Hey all,

The other day I bought a Game Boy Micro (Japanese 20th Anniversary Famicom edition!) and the seller kindly brought his copy of ShinyGold for me to test. After testing the Micro, I caved and bought the game too.

I'm curious though, how can I go about backing up the save file? I tried the same GBA utility (GBA Backup Tool v0.21) that I've used on my other GBA games and it doesn't work. Just for testing purposes I backed up my copy of Emerald and it worked, but ShinyGold failed 3 attempts. Every time I load the game, it says "the save has been deleted..."

I tried loading the save in VBA-M v2.0.0, mGBA 0.6.3-win32, mGBA 0.7.2-win64, my DSTWO's NDSGBA and even TEMPGBA to no avail. My Emerald save backup read just fine in VBA-M so I didn't bother with the other emulators for that.

According to the backup tool, the ROM hack is based off Pokemon Ruby.

Here's a picture I have of the cartridge.

(Look at this beauty!)

 

[striderx]

It's hard to say exactly other than ShinyGold is not a legit Nintendo/Gamefreak product. It's a hacked game and any compatibility with utilities built around official game code would be purely incidental.

Good luck figuring it out though.

Strider

https://fakepokemon.fandom.com/wiki/Pokemon_Shiny_Gold

"Pokemon Shiny Gold was released in 2006 after fears that nintendo would not revisit the Jhoto region. It is a hack of Pokemon Fire Red and is a near identical remake of Pokemon Gold, with a few exceptions of course.

The Graphics are updated from Fire red with new sprites and Pokemon from the Hoenn region appearing throughout the game.

This is one of the more popular hacks out there and is availible to download free as a ROM or on the GameBoyAdvance (around £/$5-15 - eBay) Edit-it appeares that Zane will never finish this game. It's been stuck on Version 6 for a long time, since 2006. And I've found no evidence that it will be continued. Sad, because it was actually really fun."​

 

[SonicRings]

It's hard to say exactly other than ShinyGold is not a legit Nintendo/Gamefreak product. It's a hacked game and any compatibility with utilities built around official game code would be purely incidental.

Good luck figuring it out though.

Strider

https://fakepokemon.fandom.com/wiki/Pokemon_Shiny_Gold

"Pokemon Shiny Gold was released in 2006 after fears that nintendo would not revisit the Jhoto region. It is a hack of Pokemon Fire Red and is a near identical remake of Pokemon Gold, with a few exceptions of course.

The Graphics are updated from Fire red with new sprites and Pokemon from the Hoenn region appearing throughout the game.

This is one of the more popular hacks out there and is availible to download free as a ROM or on the GameBoyAdvance (around £/$5-15 - eBay) Edit-it appeares that Zane will never finish this game. It's been stuck on Version 6 for a long time, since 2006. And I've found no evidence that it will be continued. Sad, because it was actually really fun."​

Wait, your quote says it's a hack of Pokemon Fire Red. Why then does it say Pokemon Ruby in my DS? It looks like Ruby to me, too, sprite-wise. Is my cart like a bad version of the rom hack or something?

 

[romanaOne]

I had similar problems with Pokemon Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald fakes a while back. The roms (and hardware?) have been patched somehow to save to the ROM itself. If you dump the ROM and open it in an emulator, you can load your save game. However, when you try to save in the emulator, the game freezes. The games had been patched in some way: all of the dumps were 32MB even though the real roms are 16MB.

There is 64KB of SRAM present according to gbxcart, but when I open the case there's no battery! If you try to dump the save, you just get a corrupt save file. You can see where the battery is supposed to go and I was thinking of soldering on a few batteries and reflashing the carts with other games that can work with 64KB or smaller SRAM. (Since Pokemon saves are 128KB, reflashing the legit ROM and soldering on a battery won't work.)

More recently, I bought Pokemon Light Platinum romhack on a cart because I wanted a cheap reflashable cart to experiment with. When I took it apart, I discovered the battery was missing and the game had been patched to do a similar strange thing to save: the ROM was 32MB and the save data was inside it. gbxcart said it has 128KB of SRAM and extracted garbage for the save file.

Perhaps whoever makes these carts is lying and saying they have FRAM? It seemed like the seller thought the game was decent quality, but I think this saving to the main flash chips can't be good for them. This practice seems pretty shabby even by fake game standards.