Hacking M3 Gameboy Saves

[Tedward.]

Could someone please explain to me how GBA save files work for the M3 DS real?
I tried playing the Mother 3 translation on it, and ran into crashing problems, so I played it on VBA(a GBA emulator). I fiddled with a few things and got Mother 3 running perfectly on my M3, but I'm 2 hours into the game and need a way to convert my save file from a .sav that VBA made, into something that the M3 can read. I made a new save on my M3, and it made a .0 and a .is0 file for Mother 3. I tried converting the .sav to a .0 with a save file converter, but instead of loading that, My M3 loaded the save that I made when testing Mother 3 earlier, regardless of the fact that I deleted all the save files. What on earth do I need to do?

tl;dr I need my M3 to read a .sav for a GBA game. How do I do this?

 

[Earthbound2]

So is your Mother 3 Working on your GBA Expansion or not?

Because if it isn't, there's no other way I believe.. Since .sav's need the actual ROM so the .sav's could be loaded..

Basically, without a Mother 3 ROM On your Expansion, there's no way for the M3 to read a .sav (not that I know of..)

 

[santorix10]

http://www.shunyweb.info/convert.php

 

[carterman]

The M3 Real has problems with Mother 3 saving. Use GBA ExpLoader to play the game, that's what's worked for me. As for save formats, I don't know how VBA saves work, but from my experience the m3 real will load them directly without any problem, and it will just pad the files to 128KB. Try just loading the VBA dave directly on your microsd and let the m3 read it. If it keeps your save data, then good, but the m3 real's gba loader has trouble reading and writing the mother 3 save file, at least for the translated one.

I'll have more in an hour or so.

OK. To get the game working on the M3 Real with loading and saving, I had to SRAM patch the game using GBATA. Afterwards, worked fine. Now, from what I can tell, the M3 Real handles saves by merely padding them to 128 KB, and this usually works with Flash and SRAM save types. Now, with EEPROM save types the technique they use is FUBAR, because none of my backed up EEPROM saves work at all, at least not from cart_save, but I've deduced that the problem is NOT cart_save and my M3 CF as much as the M3 expansion just not liking EEPROM saves, because GBA ExpLoader won't load them properly either. The only real solution I keep coming up with is to use the GBA Backup Tool 0.2 on a different flash cart, because it doesn't work on the M3 Real due to Rudolph and the M3 Team having a little tiff over Sakura hacking. I'm still waiting for my acekard2 to get here from DealExtreme, any day now...