Hello,
Recently I purchased the Kazzo INL Retro Dumper-Programmer from InfiniteNESLives, with the intention of dumping the SRAM of all my old actual NES carts. These were the games I grew up with, and most of them have still retained their save data all these years, and I just wanted to be able to back them up while I still could, before that part of my childhood was lost forever.
Using the guide I found in this thread, I was successfully able to dump the SRAM of most of my games. (Thank you so much!! ) However, there were a few couple ones I just could not get to work, at all: Shadowgate and StarTropics. (Also, I haven't tried StarTropics 2, but for reasons I will explain in just a second, I am reasonably sure it will end up having the same problem.) I stopped to do some research, and that was when I noticed the link between the working versus non-working ones was in the mappers: Dragon Warrior, NES Open, all the games that actually worked use the MMC1 mapper according to this list. Shadowgate and StarTropics (and StarTropics 2) use MMC3.
Ah, so I just run it using mmc3.ag instead of mmc1_sxrom.ag and that will fix it, right?
Wrong. Those games still won't work, even with the proper script, and that's where I'm stumped. It acts like it's working, it goes through the motions and spits out a .sav file and everything, but that .sav file is basically blank and useless--putting it in with the other .sav files and testing with a ROM changes nothing; it acts like a completely new game with no save data whatsoever. The .sav file is right there, but it may as well not be. I assume that means the .sav file is no good, which means something in the dumping process didn't work. And yes, I have confirmed that the save data still exists and is valid on the actual cart in an actual NES.
So, now I turn to you. Is there some sort of trick I'm missing to get the .sav files from transfer over properly? You can dump the SRAM data of MMC3 games with an INL Kazzo dumper, right?
Recently I purchased the Kazzo INL Retro Dumper-Programmer from InfiniteNESLives, with the intention of dumping the SRAM of all my old actual NES carts. These were the games I grew up with, and most of them have still retained their save data all these years, and I just wanted to be able to back them up while I still could, before that part of my childhood was lost forever.
Using the guide I found in this thread, I was successfully able to dump the SRAM of most of my games. (Thank you so much!! ) However, there were a few couple ones I just could not get to work, at all: Shadowgate and StarTropics. (Also, I haven't tried StarTropics 2, but for reasons I will explain in just a second, I am reasonably sure it will end up having the same problem.) I stopped to do some research, and that was when I noticed the link between the working versus non-working ones was in the mappers: Dragon Warrior, NES Open, all the games that actually worked use the MMC1 mapper according to this list. Shadowgate and StarTropics (and StarTropics 2) use MMC3.
Ah, so I just run it using mmc3.ag instead of mmc1_sxrom.ag and that will fix it, right?
Wrong. Those games still won't work, even with the proper script, and that's where I'm stumped. It acts like it's working, it goes through the motions and spits out a .sav file and everything, but that .sav file is basically blank and useless--putting it in with the other .sav files and testing with a ROM changes nothing; it acts like a completely new game with no save data whatsoever. The .sav file is right there, but it may as well not be. I assume that means the .sav file is no good, which means something in the dumping process didn't work. And yes, I have confirmed that the save data still exists and is valid on the actual cart in an actual NES.
So, now I turn to you. Is there some sort of trick I'm missing to get the .sav files from transfer over properly? You can dump the SRAM data of MMC3 games with an INL Kazzo dumper, right?