Hacking Cannot Save GBA Games; Faulty GBA pack?

[firaga01]

I think I have a broken GBA expansion pack or something.

I've scoured the Internet all day trying to find an answer to my predicament. I got the M3 DS Real bundle with the GBA pak, and I've created three folders on my FAT16-formatted cartridge: GBA, NDS and SYSTEM. I drag and drop .nds and .gba games in their respective folders, and when I test the DS games, they all create save games just fine and work marvellously.

I don't know what's wrong with my GBA roms. None of the games I've put on will save. (I've tried Super Mario World, Super Mario Bros. 3, Yoshi's Island, WarioWare, and Donkey Kong Country). In the cases of the mario games, all I get is a "Your data is corrupt" screen and the game will not proceed further. For DKC, I can boot the game and play fine, but when i try to save it throws a "Save Failed" message my way.

I know some versions of m3 had you restart the game in order to make a save slot on the microsd cartridge. Well, I checked my cartridge, and after playing a GBA game once, I get a .0 and a .is0 file. However, in the case of Warioware, if I trying pushing the reset switch after the game tries to save, and then run the .gba file again (and presumably load the save files) and save again, and then start the game up for a 3rd time, I still cannot access any saved data.

I've also tried using the M3 game manager and written GBA games to the cartridge and formatted them via all three methods (soft, hardware 1, and hardware 2) with no success.

Some of the Mario games begin with a "GameBoy Player" logo, something I've seen actual counterfeit Mario cartridges do. But I also got all my DS games off Usenet, but those work perfectly. i've tried other roms like Yoshi's Island and they play fine on VBA but just hang at the "Your Data is Corrupted." screen.

Could it also be that my GBA cartridge is just screwed up? I mean, it should be working. here's a youtube video of someone successfully booting Yoshi's island on a m3 ds real: http://youtube.com/watch?v=LpIfthb9EYE.

Any, and I mean *any* help would be appreciated, guys.

 

[beautifulbeast]

I don't know about M3 and its GBA pack, but I use R4 + EZ IV + Rudolph's pack and what everyone forgets to tell you is that you must patch all roms before you store them in your sd card with a program called GBATA that you can download from the download centre. Just run it in your system (native to Windows but works perfectly under Wine in Linux) and go to the SRAM Patcher tag.
I know our setups are different, but before I started patching my roms I got the exact same message you are now so I guess you might give it a try. The only ROM that might give you some problem is Super Mario Bros. 3 (I think it's Super Mario World 4 in the GBA nomenclature), with has to be trimmed with GBATA as well as patched.
Feel free to PM me with any questions if you keep having problems.

 

[firaga01]

thanks for the quick reply. Let's give it a shot!

*UPDATE* I tried just dropping the patched .gba file onto the GBA folder and I tried writing it using the game manager. No luck. :-(

*UPDATE 2* I gave up and rma'd the whole mess back to RHS. I guess the thing's suffering from QA problems. Hopefully my new copy won't suck.

 

[g6team]

There could be several reason that the GBA isn't saving properly.

1) Try charging the Gba Expansion plug it in your nds leave it charging.
2) After you exit from a saved GBA game you have to turn your Nds back on and go back to the GBA menu to transfer the saved from the Sdram to the main save.

 

[firaga01]

Getting a new GBA pack fixed my problem.