drrainbows wrote:
For software like PR8 and Pulsar, a 32kb save is required to save all songs and patterns. I ended up using the 32kb sram after a couple of hours fiddling with my powerpak and earthbound zero for about an hour. Guess it was an accident. Point is, it worked and i can now continue playing earthbound zero. Does that answer your question?
Yes. You found what is called "a kludge" for getting something to work, based on comparisons against strange things (I'm not judging!). Let's review the actual technical details:
PR8 is a homebrew effort from Neil Baldwin, and is supposedly an
SXROM board using mapper 1, but it's "quirk" is that it legitimately uses 32KBytes of SRAM (SXROM supports this, and Neil was regularly here on the forum discussing how to accomplish it). See the Requirements section of the page. Again: it's very unique in this regard. There aren't commercial games (that I know of) which use more than 8KBytes.
Pulsar is another homebrew effort from Neil Baldwin, and is subject to the exact same design/aspects of PR8 above.
I'll get to EarthBound Zero in a moment, but first: MOTHER is a
TKROM board + MMC3 (mapper 4) game. I would think that Nintendo would have retained that in the prototype EarthBound Zero (TKROM and MMC3 were used in US commercial titles!), but I simply don't know and don't want to assume.
EarthBound Zero is one of those officially-translated-but-unreleased/prototype games. It's MOTHER but in English. I have no idea what actual board type or mapper it uses. This is compounded by the fact that
there a bunch of romhacked translations of MOTHER, several of which were called EarthBound Zero (the one from Neo Demiforce is the main one I'm referring to -- and this hits home with me because I've been working for Demi for the past year :-) ). So which exact ROM are we talking about that misbehaves/doesn't save? Filename and SHA1 (or MD5) checksum would be perfect. It's the only way to know.
I have
8f7f4a622a924218b07727c57669a3d3 *Earthbound (U) (Prototype).nes (which supposedly uses TKROM board + MMC3 (mapper 4), and 8KBytes of SRAM), so please verify on your side if you could. No I have not tested it on my PowerPak (but I believe your claims), and my PowerPak uses a tweaked/modified mapper set from someone here on the forum, so it wouldn't be an identical test to yours necessarily.
Finally, you didn't disclose whose mapper set you're using on your PowerPak. It matters.
There are several, and the mapper behaviours differ per set. Note how MMC3 (mapper 4) has been modified/changed across all mapper sets. If I had to put my money on something, it'd be that.
Are we having fun yet? :-)
My point is that you should not going around advocating use of 32KByte .sav files (PR8 and Pulsar are unique and justified, like I said -- we're not going to talk about those, cool?). The problem is that once this is figured out and/or fixed, your 32KB .sav file fix isn't going to work any more. You're a new user on a board filled with highly technical people who absolutely can/will figure out the root cause and get it fixed properly -- no offense, again, but "Hey guys, I have a weird problem, and it seems others do too, can someone help narrow down what the cause is? I know a workaround but I get the impression something deeper is amiss" goes a lot further around here than pushing kludgy fixes.