Homebrew CTR-GCS 0.3 : Finally, transfer F-zero savegames!

[suloku]

I'm sorry, your savegame is NTSC and my game is PAL. I tried to region convert it, but it showed as corrupted.

I've made the process myself and I obtained a raw with the same hash as "3rdPartyWithOfficialHeaderAndFZeroSave.raw", so that one should theoretically work, at least with dolphin.

I'll modify ctr-gcs to print the memcards flashID on screen, maybe then we'll get some light if your 3rd party card does have a flashID...

But I did play on my wii with a friends savegame (I'm saying just to note that I didn't test only in dolphin)

 

[themanuel]

I believe you that it works. No doubt about that.
I'm just trying to get it to work on my end.

Any hints on what I might be able to do to get the "make game save valid" AR working on Dolphin?

 

[suloku]

I can't right now, but messing with SRAM is easy. I'll add showing card's ID on screen, so you can see

Working with sram is quite easy actually (I myself made open sram language modifier, I just noticed it messes up with the same, duh!). So tueidj's workaround to make it work on official mc's might work, I'll try that out of curiosity.

But hopefully if I put flashID on sram to zeros (like unoficial cards) raw restoring to official cards will work... let's cross fingers.

BTW, I also made some improvements to gci restore/dump, it is now more conservative with the data, it should fix some of the problems that happened with banners.

 

[themanuel]

Bueno, I'll keep playing with Dolphin and AR to see if I get lucky.

 

[themanuel]

If you don't have AR, you can still use a computer to transfer de savegame:

Get GCI of f-zero savegame
Get raw of destination card

Insert gci to raw card via dolphin card manager

Load f-zero with the raw card in dolphin with cheat enabled and save the game. (the cheat is already in dolphin: right click on game, then propierties)

Extract gci and insert to destination card (as the save has been saved to a raw card with the same serial than the destination card)

Just to clarify, since I've made many posts so I don't know if this wasn't clear:
What you described above does not work in Dolphin (for me). The emulated game forces you to delete the save file. I'm guessing that the code itself does not work in Dolphin, for some reason, although it does on the AR package for Wii, per zerofalcon's tests.
As you've stated, the header transfer trick does work in Dolphin, although the resulting image could not be transferred successfully to my 3rp party card, due to unknown reasons.

 

[Dogway]

Yes, I was reading there, I just got to the conclusion that you can take out the saves, but you can't restore them back.

No, you can restore to protected savegames either by:

- Unofficial memory card (either by gci+header or by writing a raw image) --> this is only handled by ctr-gcs 0.3a at the moment, I may add raw/header functions in the future (with proper checks to prevent restoring wrong headers to official memory card)

- The SAME card (official or not) the savegame was backuped from IF the card hasn't been formatted since.

Note that even if you format a memory card the .hdr file extracted by ctr-gcs will work in the same card EVEN if it is an official one, so actually you can backup your, say, f-zero .gci and memcard's .hdr from official card, format the card, and that f-zero savegame will still work on that card as long as the header is restored too.

ah nice! so the mainly concern actually (development wise) is transfering protected savegames between official memcards, right? which is a rather (maybe?) unlikely situation.

That said I can use ctr-gcs, make the backup (.gci and .hdr), and rest assure I can restore that save in either unofficials memcards or my own official memcard. (or other official memcards formatted and restored with my own card header(?)), correct me if I'm wrong.

Ive long been waiting to replay F-Zero after I lost my saves last year.

 

[themanuel]

With zerofalcon's find, you can restore your save to any memory card, if you know how to use cheats with DML.
See here. For the PAL version of the gct, go here.

To answer your previous question, yes, you should be able to restore your savefile without cheats, as long as you have the header of the original card from where the save came, and you restore that header to the new card where you intend to store the save file. However, did method did not work with my card because it kept getting corrupted whenever I tried replaced its header, so your mileage may vary. The cheat is the only sure way.

 

[suloku]

That said I can use ctr-gcs, make the backup (.gci and .hdr), and rest assure I can restore that save in either unofficials memcards or my own official memcard. (or other official memcards formatted and restored with my own card header(?)), correct me if I'm wrong.

Not totally correct: the savegame will work in the original (official) card even if formated if you restore the header.

Clarifying

Everytime the card is formated the card's ID is scrambled in the header, that is why restoring a header works in the SAME official memory card (so, you can have different header files for a given card, but note that you must restore the header that was present
Unoficial cards ID is all zeros, this is also why you can restore header to any unofficial card.

Restoring a header that wasn't extracted from an official card will make report the card as "broken" and the wii/gamecube will want to format it.

Clarifying again:

Official header + gci -> same card (regardless if it was formated since the backup) --> OK
Official header + gci -> unoficial card --> OK
Official header + gci -> card will "break" and require formating it.

Unnofficial header + gci -> only to unoficial memory cards

With zerofalcon's find, you can restore your save to any memory card, if you know how to use cheats with DML.
See here. For the PAL version of the gct, go here.

To answer your previous question, yes, you should be able to restore your savefile without cheats, as long as you have the header of the original card from where the save came, and you restore that header to the new card where you intend to store the save file. However, did method did not work with my card because it kept getting corrupted whenever I tried replaced its header, so your mileage may vary. The cheat is the only sure way.

Did your card work in gcmm 1.0?

Can you make the following test?

1.- Insert your unnoficial card in SLOT A
2.- browse savegames gcmm 1.1 (it needs to be 1.1) / ctr-gcs 0.3a / wii's savedata manager
3.- Go to homebrew channel
4.- launch open sram language modifier v5

You'll see an "hex view" of SRAM. Either make a screenshot (mobile phone may be enough) or write down the seconds line please.
If your card doesn't have flash id the second line should be 8 numbers and then 24 zeroes.

 

[themanuel]

I get the following:
04 00 00 E4 and the rest zeroes, as you said.

 

[suloku]

Then restoring a header file should work...

What's the size (in blocks) of the original card you extracted the header from
What's the size of your unnofficial card?

 

[themanuel]

Both are the same size, 251 blocks.
Whenever I put the header on it, it would render it inoperable, according to the Wii's memory card management feature. This included attempts of restoring the whole raw image of that card, with the other header inserted. However, GCMM would still recognize the card and see the savefiles inside.
It's not a big deal now, though, since the cheat allows me to do what I need but if you need particular tests to be run to aid you in the development of your tools, I could do that for you.

 

[tueidj]

You can't copy the header from an official card to an unofficial card since they have different IDs...

 

[WiiUBricker]

I always used my official card up until now, but this thread makes me think about getting an unofficial card. I stayed away from unofficial cards up until now because I heard sometimes these cards tend to corrupt the save data.

 

[themanuel]

You can mitigate the risk by backing up regularly with all the tools we now have at our disposal.

 

[suloku]

You can't copy the header from an official card to an unofficial card since they have different IDs...

Well, since I personally transfered the f-zero gci and header from an official card to my unofficial one and played the retail game with that with no problems I think you are wrong in that. My guess is that f-zero reads the serial stored in the mc header and not the one in the SRAM, official cards unlock sucessfully always, so having a different header in the mc doesn't affect normal operation.

BTW, It is strange that GCMM still mounts the card with no problems, as it should only mount the card when the mount function returns 0 or 1, and the error when changing the header to an official card (and makes you require formatting it) is error -6...

 

[tueidj]

That makes no sense - when a game mounts a card the serial in the SRAM (which is the card's actual serial retrieved during unlocking) is compared to the card's header, if they don't match the game will say the card needs formatting. It's exactly the same as trying to transfer from one official card to another. You can only transfer from one unofficial card to another unofficial because they share the same serial number, all zeroes.

 

[JoostinOnline]

That makes no sense - when a game mounts a card the serial in the SRAM (which is the card's actual serial retrieved during unlocking) is compared to the card's header, if they don't match the game will say the card needs formatting. It's exactly the same as trying to transfer from one official card to another. You can only transfer from one unofficial card to another unofficial because they share the same serial number, all zeroes.

What? Does this apply to all games? My brother was the big GC player (before he lost all our games), so I don't know much about it. Are you saying that you can never copy a save file from one official card to another? If not, then why would they add two memory card slots?

 

[tueidj]

Protected saves, which can only be copied with homebrew in the first place...

 

[OriginalHamster]

Can F-Zero be copied to another mc with Homebrew?

 

[suloku]

That makes no sense - when a game mounts a card the serial in the SRAM (which is the card's actual serial retrieved during unlocking) is compared to the card's header, if they don't match the game will say the card needs formatting. It's exactly the same as trying to transfer from one official card to another. You can only transfer from one unofficial card to another unofficial because they share the same serial number, all zeroes.

That makes sense, and it means that I've been confused all along thinking that the raw a friend gave me was from an oficial card... I was so convinced of it that I didn't try another savegame.
I'll ask my friend to confirm, I'm feeling really stupid right now.