I was playing Mother 1+2 on a NDS Lite with R4 card and EZ-FLash 3in1.

I had loaded the Mother1+2 GBA file into the PSRAM of the cart.

After exiting, I noticed that my .sav file, located on the microSD card, was only 16 bytes in size?!
I tried a few other games in PSRAM and they leave save files of irregular sizes ranging from 16 bytes to 8.02 KB.

I am able to restore my game normally on the NDS+R4+EZ3in1 but the save file does not work on visual boy advance.

Does EZ3in1 store save files in some strange way when you are running the game from PSRAM?

For a game in the NOR, I can use GBAtool to extract a usable battery .sav file, no problem.

 

Sorry, I must have lost this among my sea of tabs.

Saves should be some power of 2 bytes (half a kilobyte through to 512 kilobytes), the reason you see 8.02KB in this case is because WOOD/AKAIO adds a header to the save. This is for good reason as GBA saves have no header and if you do not know what game it comes from then it is a nightmare. As this is not part of any other flash cart setup, emulator...... you will need to remove it. Occasionally you will also need to pad out or remove save data for things like pokemon and some older versions of VBA. You should just be able to slice it off with a hex editor and restore it to have it work in an emulator and putting it back for when you need that, I did have a batch file around here somewhere to use with filecutter ( http://crackerscrap.com/index.php and click on projects) but I will have to search for that and I have to run shortly (I think it was 12 bytes though that should be easy enough to confirm). Alternatively I guess you could use Rudolph's expansion cart management stuff ( http://filetrip.net/nds-downloads/applications/download-gba-exploader-0-58b0mx-f10382.html ) but in some ways that defeats the object.

The 3 in 1 (and most other lines of GBA EZ gear starting with the original EZ3) will have several sections of memory to do things with.

The loader section (not present on the 3 in 1)
The SRAM section, this is what the battery is for and what stores you saves. Also occasionally some data but nobody does that any more.
The PSRAM section aka RAM section. This is between 16 and 32 megabytes depending upon the model, though it will always be 16 for the 3 in 1 line.
The NOR section. This will be between 32 and 64 megabytes but most programs only use 32 here. The EZ4 lite deluxe used 48 but that is a different matter.

If the game has a real save (some games have none and some have passwords or some form) then it will end up in the SRAM until it is removed. The 3 in 1 has no onboard management as far as the end user is concerned and everything is down to what you use to launch it. Technically you can have a game on the NOR and its save along with a game on the PSRAM and its save (it is what older flash carts did to allow multiple games and saves) but nothing beyond a couple of beta EZ5 kernels will do that there.

 

Well, the file is 32768+16 bytes = 32784. So I tried trimming off the first 16 bytes. No luck it still doesn't work in VBA.

Here's what I did. The part I cut is highlighted.