Hacking Savegame Transfer, to and from Retail Game and Rom, is it possible?

[J. Sinclair]

I was wondering as Omega has been out for almost a little month now;
Is there a way to take the save game I have on my retail game cart and use it with my own dump of the game?

I read that the save game is saved on the Retail Game Cart, and after a little digging I found out there is an app to transfer that save game to a downloaded version of the game (eg. if you DL'd the game from the E-shop and it was purchased legally.)

Now since Rom's don't work like that I was curious if it was possible to do something similar.

Can I safely use the official app to send it to my 3DS SD card and then use it with my rom, or does the Gateway team need to add another option in their Gateway Boot menu for this to work?

It's very easy to just bring the Gateway Cart and not worry about having a ton of games with me if I want to play them, but I would like to bring my savegames with me as well.

So, Is there a way?

*Copy the savegame data from a Retail cart and place it in the main 3DS SD card to use it with a rom dump of that same game?

*Do I need more hardware to get to it?

*If not, is there a real reason why this is not an option?

(I like to ask these stupid questions as I would like to know as much as I can about this.)

 

[zhdarkstar]

No. The .sav format of the GW is different than the save format that eShop titles use. It's also different than .sav format that the save dongles on the market rip from retail carts.

 

[J. Sinclair]

Ok... but would it not be in the interest to make them all compatible or create a converter?
I see this as something that would have been thought of by now, but I'm not quite sure what the difference in the formats are...

 

[zhdarkstar]

Ok... but would it not be in the interest to make them all compatible or create a converter?
I see this as something that would have been thought of by now, but I'm not quite sure what the difference in the formats are...

Unfortunately, something like that would only come from a homebrew developer as all of the different save formats are the result of each company's own way of doing things. It won't be until much later in the 3DS flashcart life cycle that there would be a possibility of seeing flashcarts/dongles using the raw nintendo save format.

 

[J. Sinclair]

Right... It's sort of still in it's infancy...
Well, thank you for being honest

 

[MelonGx]

All 3DS saves have encryption.
Most of them cannot be decrypted and re-encrypted.
That's why GW saves aren't compatible with legitimate cart saves, and different legitimate cart saves aren't compatible each other.

 

[y03usw6e]

I posted this in a different thread. I tried to transfer a distributed Pokemon X save from a ROM to my eShop copy, and it worked.
I don't know if it works with CARD1 games.

Actually, I tried it last night, and yes you can with the eShop version. However, you still require a Gateway 3DS to get it up and running.

I started off by creating a duplicate of my SD card, contents and emuNAND, but you don't need to do this if you don't mind losing your save.
This is essentially what you need to do.

1. Inject the save file into a rom using one of the tools in the first post. I used a USA rom to match my region. I don't know if it'll work otherwise.
2. Put that rom onto your microSD, then into your Gateway red card, and into your system
3. Boot into Gateway mode (emuNAND with most recent firmware required)
4. Download the Save Data Transfer Tool off of the eShop
5. After returning to the main menu, select your Pokemon rom using the multirom menu.
6. Start the Save Data Transfer Tool, and follow the onscreen instructions.

7. Enjoy

 

[Pedeadstrian]

I posted this in a different thread. I tried to transfer a distributed Pokemon X save from a ROM to my eShop copy, and it worked.
I don't know if it works with CARD1 games.

It doesn't, unfortunately. I wish it did, though.

 

[y03usw6e]

It doesn't, unfortunately. I wish it did, though.

I imagine it would be possible if there was a way to inject the save into the CARD1 ROM, rather than having the save file on the SD card.

EDIT: Scratch that. Not possible at all.