Hacking Sky3ds eeprom benefits?

[MrGoomba]

I have a few questions about the Sky3ds saving mechanism.

It is my understanding that Sky3ds saves game data in two ways. The first using the 10 eeprom slots, which the first 10 games with eeprom=yes you play will take those slots. The second method is the fall back for if a game wont work with eeprom or the eeprom slots are all taken, and that is to save the data as part of the .3ds file.

With this in mind, what is the benefit of using the eeprom? It seems to me that having the ability to back up and restore your save (even between different carts) by backing up the roms, is a huge benefit of not using the eeprom. (And the consistency of knowing that all your games are using the same saving mechanism, instead of trying to remember which ones were in eeprom, is a pretty big benefit).

Do you need to press the blue button to save with both eeprom and non eeprom or with just one of them?

Lastly, is it possible to completely ignore the eeprom and make every rom eeprom=no from the start? (and will this negatively impact the functionality of the device?)

Am I missing something obvious?

 

[nccom]

You're talking about red or blue version? Red uses 10 fixed slots in eeprom, blue writes/reads data from it for every game.

 

[MrGoomba]

You're talking about red or blue version? Red uses 10 fixed slots in eeprom, blue writes/reads data from it for every game.

I am positive that this is not the case, even minimal research shows that both the Red and Blue button versions still use 10 eeprom slots.

The point of this post is not to debate what the card does, its trivially demonstrable to show one way or the other, and I have seen enough topics on this that I don't care to continue that debate.

My question is simply, what is the benefit of allowing those first 10 to use the eeprom, when it seems to make more sense to just turn off eeprom for all roms (and have the benefit of being able to backup/transfer the saves easily).

 

[bostonBC]

I am positive that this is not the case, even minimal research shows that both the Red and Blue button versions still use 10 eeprom slots.

The point of this post is not to debate what the card does, its trivially demonstrable to show one way or the other, and I have seen enough topics on this that I don't care to continue that debate.

My question is simply, what is the benefit of allowing those first 10 to use the eeprom, when it seems to make more sense to just turn off eeprom for all roms (and have the benefit of being able to backup/transfer the saves easily).

If what you say is true then I don't understand how the new(ish) Diskwriter can backup and restore game saves.

Do you even have a Sky3DS?

 

[MrGoomba]

If what you say is true then I don't understand how the new(ish) Diskwriter can backup and restore game saves.

Do you even have a Sky3DS?

I do have a Sky3DS.

I have never used the backup/restore feature of diskwriter, but backing up and restoring from eeprom=no (or any eeprom=yes after the first ten) is trivial. The data is stored in the .3ds file (it could be either tagged on to the end, or stored in a known location, I am not certain), either way, copying that sector out, and then restoring it when needed, would be trivial. Backing up from the actual eeprom would be much more difficult, and from all the forum posts I have read about it, its often buggy (and in fact, the recommended solution seems to be to set your games to eeprom=no to avoid using the eeprom all together if you want reliable save backups). I just want to know why eeprom=yes exists in the first place if everything seems to be better with eeprom=no, and what I would be missing if I eeprom=no to everything.

Regardless about what you think happens with eeprom=yes (I don't want this post to turn into an argument about that), eeprom=no never uses the eeprom (typically for games that have save data larger than the eeprom can hold), and you can make any game eeprom=no, so the point of the post is asking if there is any actual reason not to just do this for every game, am I missing any crucial features by saving this way?

 

[CIAwesome526]

I do have a Sky3DS.

I have never used the backup/restore feature of diskwriter, but backing up and restoring from eeprom=no (or any eeprom=yes after the first ten) is trivial. The data is stored in the .3ds file (it could be either tagged on to the end, or stored in a known location, I am not certain), either way, copying that sector out, and then restoring it when needed, would be trivial. Backing up from the actual eeprom would be much more difficult, and from all the forum posts I have read about it, its often buggy (and in fact, the recommended solution seems to be to set your games to eeprom=no to avoid using the eeprom all together if you want reliable save backups). I just want to know why eeprom=yes exists in the first place if everything seems to be better with eeprom=no, and what I would be missing if I eeprom=no to everything.

Well, I'm going to guess eeprom is faster. With a slow sd card it can take ages to load a save. As in it would take longer to load a save/save your game than to load a file from the rom such as a new area.

 

[jrebey]

I do have a Sky3DS.

I have never used the backup/restore feature of diskwriter, but backing up and restoring from eeprom=no (or any eeprom=yes after the first ten) is trivial. The data is stored in the .3ds file (it could be either tagged on to the end, or stored in a known location, I am not certain), either way, copying that sector out, and then restoring it when needed, would be trivial. Backing up from the actual eeprom would be much more difficult, and from all the forum posts I have read about it, its often buggy (and in fact, the recommended solution seems to be to set your games to eeprom=no to avoid using the eeprom all together if you want reliable save backups). I just want to know why eeprom=yes exists in the first place if everything seems to be better with eeprom=no, and what I would be missing if I eeprom=no to everything.

Regardless about what you think happens with eeprom=yes (I don't want this post to turn into an argument about that), eeprom=no never uses the eeprom (typically for games that have save data larger than the eeprom can hold), and you can make any game eeprom=no, so the point of the post is asking if there is any actual reason not to just do this for every game, am I missing any crucial features by saving this way?

It's not stored in the .3ds file. IIRC, it's stored in the savedata partition on the card and moved in and out of the EEPROM.

 

[MrGoomba]

It's not stored in the .3ds file. IIRC, it's stored in the savedata partition on the card and moved in and out of the EEPROM.

Im pretty sure that it does not do this (copy in and out of eeprom) for any games past the 10th eeprom=yes since there is no unused eeprom slot for it to copy into. Regardless, since I don't wish to argue this, nor do I have more than a "researched on the internet" understanding about the internals of the cart, I don't wish to discuss this, besides its moot to this post, I am talking specifically about eeprom=no games, or games that you manually set as eeprom=no. Since the cart has no way of telling if a game will work with the eeprom, other than the template setting, it has to assume that any eeprom=no title wont work with eeprom period, so another mechanism is in play for these games (which any game can be) outside of eeprom.

One poster brought up speed of save/load, but many of these games can be bought on the eShop and stored on the microSD card, and they save/load at a decent speed, so with a decent class 10, I wouldnt think that this would be an issue since games that have saves that fit in the eeprom have relatively small saves anyway (its the large save games that load slow, and they cant use eeprom anyway).