Can people please send me EZ Flash save files?

[EuanF]

I'm the author of savefileconverter.com and I'd like to start adding support for flash carts, and specifically EZ Flash carts since I've heard that sometimes save files from them aren't compatible with emulators or other flash carts.

I already have an EZ Flash ODE, but I don't have any other EZ Flash carts. I'm especially interested in Gameboy, Gameboy Color, and Gameboy Advance saves, but I'd also be interested in DS saves.

Are there other flash carts where people have run into the same issue of saves not being compatible?

Can people please attach some here so I can take a look at them and figure out how to convert to/from them? I just need the name of the game and which flash cart was used.

Thank you very much!

 

[FAST6191]

Most EZFlash saves should be raw saves. The main ones that won't be are some (third party but never the less popular, the names escape me right now though) managers for the 3 in 1 (originally an expansion pack for DS carts but was made open source and got quite popular) added either a header or a footer to them. Simple detection there being not a normal power of 2 size. There are a few threads and tools around here to fix that and detail things (some combo of ezflash header footer save should bring them up).
Any issues normally being picky emulators, tricky names (all official EZFlash stuff went for the file name rather than header/serial based stuff of some emulators and flash carts), size trickiness (see old VBA and Flash sizes vs homebrew vs pokemon), user error (wrong region), corruption (batteries, kernel issues, ROM issues and turning off too soon) or going to other custom formats that did use headers/footers (said headers/footers usually being at best a file name and at worst for the average user and potentially your save conversion efforts some serial and header values*). As far as VBA is concerned then file - import - battery save or whatever it was tending to do me just fine.

*serials are not always unique so sometimes regions, revision number and more come into play.

Some DS stuff was potentially tricky with earlier EZ5 kernels -- they had a save list where everybody else/the R4 that everybody copied defaulted to just assuming 512 kilobytes (while we still were dealing with 2 gig max SD at this point it was considered an acceptable loss for the drag and drop but update every other day vs 2 clicks in a menu and continued supporting games for years afterwards with no update strictly necessary crowd). To that end the saves of earlier EZ5 stuff might well have been the actual size of the game's save rather than padded out. Think some of the EZ4 DS mode saves defaulted to 256 KB rather than 512 or some variation on that theme -- other than Daigasso Band Brothers, Art Academy, Jam with the Band, Warioware and I think there was another most things topped out at 2Mbit but things measured in kbits stuck around until the end). You can poke around http://www.advanscene.com/ or some ROM list if you want, such things might even give you a header value and size list if you wanted.

I am not aware of any save compression being employed for anything. Mostly no$gba and possibly the DSx going in for that.

GB and GBC stuff might get fun depending upon what goes. Their only GB/GBC effort is the comparatively recent EZFlash Jr. Everything before then (including the Omega line) will be a wrapper for the goomba emulator at some level which means you are better served playing with that instead. It should be open source so easy enough to sort there (don't think they will be simple concatenation but also don't know the format).

After that it is pretty much going to be savestates or save editing for early EZ4 stuff (they dumped a version of their own firmware rather than the user's for DS mode and hence names/favourite colours/birthdays/... might not have been respected for those DS games that cared).

I can scare some up later if you really want though.

 

[EuanF]

Thanks for all the info!

Yeah, my understanding is that the conversion should be pretty simple: just a header/footer as you say.

So it sounds like the most popular things where saves aren't raw are the EZ Flash Jr, and the Goomba emulator? And possibly the 3-in-1 manager software?

Since the conversion is going to be pretty simple, I think it would be easiest to just have some example saves of each, please. And I'll need them for testing anyway. If I run into trouble I can try and dig up someone else's code, but it sounds like it should be quite straightforward.

So yeah, please attach what you can!

Thank you!

 

[FAST6191]

The EZflash Jr is a GB/GBC flash cart through and through. Needs GB/GBC hardware to run (so no DS/DS lite, gb micro). I will have to look but as far as I am aware it is raw saves. Might even be outside the scope of your site/program.

The other stuff until you hit DS mode is going to be some variation on the theme of Goomba (a GB/GBC emulator that runs on the GBA, originally GB only but later forks/versions, usually under the banner of goomba color, could do GBC as well which was a surprise to many as it was more or less full speed and only came at the cost of a few fun extras that the GB line could handle) -- it was an option to build in the EZClient program of the EZ1/2, also sort of used by the EZ3 (most would have had a copy of EZclient to dump games with), give or take the DS stuff used by the EZ4 for those wanting such things and inbuilt into the kernel for the Omega line.
https://www.dwedit.org/dwedit_board/viewtopic.php?id=685 seems to cover a bit on the save structure.

The 3 in 1 was a GBA slot expansion pack to allow DS flash carts the option to run GBA games (DS slot being too slow to reasonably do anything -- the supercard dstwo and ismm having their own onboard processors which is how they managed that). Originally it shipped with the EZ5 which has it own management inside the kernel (few different flavours as time went on but nothing that should terribly bother saves*). They however open sourced the access libraries at least so we saw various tools made to handle it ( https://wiki.gbatemp.net/wiki/3_in_1_Expansion_Pack_for_EZ-Flash_V#Third-Party ), and options added in various kernels for other flash carts. Most of those will be raw saves as well but I think it was acekard that did the header/footer thing and I don't have one of those.
Not the thread I was looking for but might be of interest https://gbatemp.net/threads/extract-save-from-ez-flash-3in1-game-in-psram.365259/

*there was a moment where they tried to add a multi game to an EZ5 kernel, however unlike the EZ2 and earlier stuff the onboard save size was smaller (though more than enough for any individual GBA game). This meant they would be facing endless nightmares from people trying to cram two pokemon games and something else onboard and it never made it out of a beta line of the kernel. Depending upon the means the saves for such a scenario were dumped with then there might be something there (some dumb save grabbing tool gets used and saves might be spread across a few pages vs what are likely still raw if you grab them from the EZ5), however it really was only a beta kernel that they tried it in and a lot of good stuff happened after that so nobody will be using it.

 

[EuanF]

I definitely think all of this is in scope for the site!

Yeah, please have a check about the EZ Flash Jr -- even if it does raw saves I'd like to add it to the site, so that people don't have to remember which cart does raw saves and which one doesn't, or to infer that one is raw by its lack of presence on the site.

I'm also getting the impression from some googling that different instances of the Goomba emulator may write out their saves differently -- like the one on the GBA mini everdrive, might be different than the EZ Flash ODE, might be different from another one. I'm not sure, so I'd like to get as many examples as I can please!

 

[Takokeshi]

Wario land 3 on everdrive, couldn't get it to save on ez4 and to be honest I can't be bothered.

You're going to want to do something like this to extract the raw save data: https://github.com/libertyernie/goombasav

I don't expect it to be any different between flashcards, the everdrive just concatenates goomba.gba together with gb/c rom on the fly and runs that, it should be the same as if you were making single-rom files for any other flashcart.

 

[EuanF]

Wario land 3 on everdrive, couldn't get it to save on ez4 and to be honest I can't be bothered.

Perfect! Thank you!

You're going to want to do something like this to extract the raw save data: https://github.com/libertyernie/goombasav

Thank you, yeah, I've been taking a look there. It's nice that someone has done this already: makes it easier for sure.

I don't expect it to be any different between flashcards, the everdrive just concatenates goomba.gba together with gb/c rom on the fly and runs that, it should be the same as if you were making single-rom files for any other flashcart.

I agree that it doesn't make sense, but I just want to cover my bases because I've seen conflicting guides posted in different places. So far I see some similarities and some differences between the file you attached and one that I made with my EZ Flash ODE. I'll dig in more and see what I can find.