Hacking Dipstar G6 Savegame Discovery

[ShadowStitch]

All right, after using Dipstar successfully for the first time tonight, I figured something out that may be completely obvious to other users, but it was frustrating news to me.

I kept trying to use Dipstar to give myself max gold on a game, and I couldn't figure out one nagging problem:

Dipstar requires that you preload the dipstar GBA file before each patched NDS play, and that gets tedious.
My aim was to use the Dipstar max gold code, then save my game.
After that, I could reload a clean copy of my game without the Dipstar patch, and use my new shiny save with nigh-infinite cash.

The only problem being that after getting the money, and saving the game, I could never seem to get the save file to copy. I would load the patched game, enable the code, save the game, erase the patched game, and reload my save on a fresh game, only to discover that none of my changes had been saved. This same effect repeated itself predictably but I couldn't figure out why. I started to wonder if Dipstar saved the file under its own name, trimmed it and stuck it in GBA, or what...it confused me for some time until after the fourth or fifth time through this procedure I noticed something: After doing a soft reset, the system never copied the sram to a numerical save file.

I loaded my game with dipstar enabled, saved my zillion gold game, and soft reset back to the menu. Then I pressed select on it and told it to copy the Sram -> Default. Then I reloaded a clean copy of my game to test this theory.

That did the trick.

It appears Dipstar just leaves the save in Sram, rather than write it to the card on reset.

So the lesson I learned is this: After applying a code and exiting the game, if you do not intend to keep playing with Dipstar enabled, copy the Sram for that title to Default, 1, or 2. Then it will be available for backup and regular use.

 

[OSW]

I can not understand what u are saying. and don't even bother trying to explain ^^

 

[Qpido]

Did you just ask a question and answer it yourself?

Q~

 

[crackpipe]

well, I get it.

and, cool. is dipstar cool? I'll end up giving it a try even if the reviews are "no.". just curious. and thanks to ShadowStitch I'll know what to do for it to work with my shiny g6. woop.

 

[ShadowStitch]

Did you just ask a question and answer it yourself?

Q~


Haha, yes, actually. I just thought I'd post my findings, however trivial, so someone else might benefit from my experimentation without having to repeat the same series of mistakes to come to the same conclusion. You never know when stumbling upon one tiny little nugget of info on a forum post can suddenly help you solve a nagging problem.

QUOTE(Crackpipe @ Dec 12 2006, 01:58 PM)well, I get it. and, cool. is dipstar cool? I'll end up giving it a try even if the reviews are "no.". just curious. and thanks to ShadowStitch I'll know what to do for it to work with my shiny g6. woop.

Dipstar is pretty cool, once you get past the initial grokking of what it is and how to use it. There are a lot of threads here, at M3 forums, and at GBADEV, about how to get Dipstar working with a G6. It's actually easy once you get the hang of it. Basically, it allows you to use Action Replay style codes on the fly without any kind of hardware. I did it like this:

1) Copy Dipstar.ds.gba to your card's gba section using the Udisk Manager.
2) Copy the NDS rom to be Dipped to the card's NDS section using the Udisk Manager.
3) In Explorer, Copy M3dip.exe to the card/s NDS folder.
3) In Explorer, go to the card's NDS folder and drag and drop the NDS rom title onto M3dip.exe.
4) Follow the onscreen instructions, press enter to patch the NDS rom.

Now you have a NDS rom that requires you to preload Dipstar.ds.gba for it to run, every time -- otherwise you will get blank screens.
Also note that if it is a newer or wifi-compatible game, it's safer to use Dipstar v3.33. It's not all that different from 5.12FF, and on some DS and some games, 5.12FF will not work.

So now this is how I ran it:

5) Turn on the DS, select 'My Card' from the menu, and navigate to the the GBA folder.
6) Press X on Dipstar.ds.gba to set it as your gba boot link. The name should appear in the corner.
7) Now navigate up to the NDS folder, and select your dipped game, and tell it 'run'.
8) As soon as the pie starts to fill up, press and hold L until the Dipstar menu loads.
9) In the dipstar menu, assign codes to a button or direction. (L is reserved for the dipstar menu).

This is pretty straightforward to do. If there are numbers in the code section there already, just delete them. Note that you must put a master code with each effect code you enter. You can't just slap an infinite life code in there, it must be accompanied by a proper Master Code or it won't work. Note that some codes may erase your savegames, so be prepared with backups just in case. There are also some codes that require a 'joker' trigger, so that you can press a combination of buttons to turn them off before you save in-game, but as for exactly which codes they are, I do not know...and that much is covered in other posts.

10) Once you have entered the codes you want, press Start to save the code, then restart the DS. Now you're ready to run the game with the codes you just entered. The next bit should look familiar.

11) Turn on the DS again, select 'My Card' from the menu, and navigate to the the GBA folder.
12) Press X on Dipstar.ds.gba to set it as your gba boot link. The name should appear in the corner.
13) Now navigate up to the NDS folder, and select your dipped game, and tell it 'run'.
14) As soon as the pie starts to fill up, press and hold the button or direction you assigned your codes to earlier.
15) Keep it held down and wait 10-15 seconds to see if it will load the game. If so, yay, if not, boo.

This is not meant to be an end-all, be-all FAQ for Dipstar, but it's the process I used to make it work. Good luck!