Hacking How to Inject 136 Kb GBA Saves with Hourglass9?

[Ailuros27]

I have some 136 kb GBA saves ripped using my Retron 5 and converted using a tool I found. They've been able to work fine with emulators like OpenEmu on Mac, and I've even been able to get some of them to inject into VC equivalents before after using VBA-M to change the save size. But now, I'm trying to inject the rest using Hourglass9 and I can't get them to register in VBA-M at all, let alone change their size. I can't recall what I did before to fix this. Does anyone know how to get these to work?

 

[proflayton123]

I have some 136 kb GBA saves ripped using my Retron 5 and converted using a tool I found. They've been able to work fine with emulators like OpenEmu on Mac, and I've even been able to get some of them to inject into VC equivalents before after using VBA-M to change the save size. But now, I'm trying to inject the rest using Hourglass9 and I can't get them to register in VBA-M at all, let alone change their size. I can't recall what I did before to fix this. Does anyone know how to get these to work?

AGBSave9 iirc

 

[Ailuros27]

AGBsave9 will inject saves of that size? Then why can't Hourglass9?

 

[proflayton123]

AGBsave9 will inject saves of that size? Then why can't Hourglass9?

Try AGBsave9, im not sure why hourglass9 can't, tried Decrypt9?

 

[Ailuros27]

The problem is the saves don't even load in VBA-m, and every other method I've heard of to change their size doesn't work. I can't inject them if they're the wrong size/format.

 

[Ailuros27]

Hey. I figured it out. At least for A Link to the Past Four Swords. It turns out the file was padded to 136 KB from a mere 8 KB. In this case, the last 8 KB of the file was the actual save. The rest was empty. I copied that last 8 KB from the file into a new file and it opens right up in VBA-m. So that's one mystery solved. But after injecting that new file with Hourglass9, the save didn't take. Comparing the 8 KB one with a clean one reveals something odd: every 8 bytes of the original (dumped from an actual cart) is inverted. So ABCDEFGH IJKLMNOP is HGFEDCBA PONMLKJI. I have no idea why.