Homebrew Recovering Gateway saves after CFW?

[Kerii]

So, I had a special edition 4.4 JP O3DSXL with Gateway on EmuNAND sitting in the closet for years, and decided to pull it out recently, only to discover Gateway team is dead.
Figured I'd have to finally bite the bullet and go CFW so I went and followed the https://3ds.hacks.guide site and got myself to 11.6 CFW.

Problem is, I never realized that the saves made when using the Gateway were in different formats than CFW installed games.
So anyways, I've spent the last several days looking up ways to extract my saves, but a lot of the answers seem several years old so I thought I'd ask and see if there's a better/easier way than these.

Option1:
https://gbatemp.net/threads/help-can-someone-convert-my-gateway-saves-to-cia.480330/#post-7503961
Creating and downgrading a new EmuNAND (problem is I can't find CTR transfer 11.2 JP files anywhere).

Option2:
No idea if this would work at all, but I made three NAND backups for my 3DS when I first bought it using my Gateway. Is it safe to restore this from Godmode9? Are they compatible? Figure if I can get it back to the way it was in one step, that'd be simpler than trying to downgrade through the above methods.

Option3:
Asking a friend to borrow his 3DS on 4.4 (that I installed CFW and gifted to him years ago) when he comes up from out of state next year mid 2020. Not sure if this would work, I hear Gateway saves are encrypted? Does it need to be on the original console to extract saves?

Option4:
I hear Gateway and Sky3DS merged to form Stargate? Are Gateway saves compatible with that?

I really only have 3 saves I really want to recover, Pokemon AS, X, and Miku.

 

[gamesquest1]

probably quickest and easiest would be using another small SD card, restore the gateway nand to that as an emunand partition, boot into gateway mode under emunand and dump the saves, not sure if the current save tools work with gateway, back when i last used it NTR CFW save data plugin was the only way to dump gateway saves (i think you need to hold L while booting the game or something)

idk maybe there are newer methods im not familiar with to dump them via PC as far as i know at this point all 3DS encryption methods are well documented, so its possible tools would exist for extracting saves via PC, just know that the saves are encrypted using the cart header you used for the original creation of the save, so if you used custom headers on any of the games you would need that same header to decrypt the saves even via GW itself

 

[Kerii]

How would I restore the Gateway backup NAND as an Emunand? Doesn't the SD card get formatted and lose all data during the creation process with Godmode9? Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, I don't understand how that would work from one SD slot unless you mean Godmode9 can hold entire NAND images in RAM while I swap the SD card?