Hardware Help with real cart saves

[funem]

I have three games that I started on real GBA carts some time ago

Star Wars II : The Original Trilogy
Banjo Kazooie : Grunties Revenge
The Legend of Zelda : The Minish Cap

I want to pull the saves off of the real carts and make a save file that I can put on my EZ IV flash card.

to make things a bit easier I will try and list the hardware I have and maybe someone can point me in the right direction to get the saves off of the carts.

I have a :-
Nintendo DS lite , DS Phat, GBA Micro, GBA SP, Supercard mini SD ( Slot 2 ), EZ Flash IV (Slot 2 ), M3 Real with the GBA Expansion, R4, Flash 2 Advance USB Cable ( which can connect the GBA SP to the PC ), Action Replay GBX Max Drive, Official DS Memory Expansion that came with the browser...

I have looked and looked through pages and pages of stuff on the web. Some programs look like thy can do the job but have very little documentation on ho to go about it, like sendsave and eepinator, maybe its just me being thick or just having a brain overload.

Thanks for any help you can give.

 

[DanTheManMS]

SavSender is for DS games, while Eepinator only works on GBA games that use SRAM for saving. You've got two major GBA-based solutions and one DS-based solution you can try:

1. Look into the cart_save program from http://chishm.drunkencoders.com/SendSave/i....html#cart_save - patch with the DLDI for your EZ-IV, launch it, and follow the instructions.

2. Download the shareware FlashManager software and use that with your F2A USB cable to dump the save file to your computer. Use the latest English beta (3.0 Beta 13 or something like that). Note that if you dump an EEPROM save you'll find that every 8 bits are flipped, which you can fix with a simple Perl script. See http://wiki.pocketheaven.com/FlashManager for more info on that. I personally tested this method with Minish Cap and can verify it works.

3. Download Rudolph's GBA Backup Tool from http://kotei.blog.so-net.ne.jp/2007-12-24 and use that with your R4 or M3 Real to dump the save file.

 

[funem]

I just started looking at the GBA Backup tool. The website its from does not have an English translation which makes life a bit harder as when I try it ( either with the R4 or M3 ) as it will backup a whole card, but the options page for the Save backup has "New Save File Create" option greyed out for all three of the games I listed. I am going to try the FlashManager software for the F2A cable next then...

Thax for the reply.

 

[DeMoN]

The best thing to do is to get an Action Replay for the GBA, one of it's main functions besides cheat codes is save backups.

 

[funem]

Tried the Action Replay and for some reason it didnt like these three games.

Right now I need to find a free copy of perl to install....

Thanks again

 

[DanTheManMS]

http://win32.perl.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page seems to advocate ActivePerl. Personally I don't think I've re-installed whatever I had installed before my hard drive crash, so I can't lookup what I used before, sorry.

EDIT: actually yeah, it was definitely ActivePerl that I had installed.

 

[funem]

Thanks for you help, I now have both Zelda and Banjo copied across, I didn't manage Star Wars as I think I was just to tired..... Glad I kept the F2A cable now.

Once again thanks

 

[funem]

Nice all three saves over using the linker cable...... Thanks for all your help.

 

[DanTheManMS]

No problem, glad I could help. Now there is one other thing you can do with a F2A cable, and that is using your GBA as a joypad for your computer, if you're interested in hearing about that. I personally used it along with the JoyToKey program to control my mouse cursor from my GBA. Gimmicky, but fun to show people.