GenPlus update, gamesaves lost

Hi guys,
quick (possibly dumb) question:

I had an old (almost a year) build of GenPlus running on my wii and finally updated it, and sadly can no longer access my gamesaves - I can see them on my SD card, but the "preview" of them is just screen static and when I try to load them I get a blank screen. If it helps, the one I'm talking about in particular is an SRAM from in-game saves in Shining Force II.
Any ideas?
I'd really like to not have to start a whole new game in Shining Force II if I can help it.

Thanks in advance,

Colin

What version are you using and what is the extension of the ROM file you are using (if it is zipped, extension of the ROM inside the zip file) ?

However, i am not sure to understand: you first say that you cannot access your saves, yet you say you got blank screen when you load them. Does the emulator menu see them or not ? It is also not clear if you are really referring to SRAM or SaveState .

Indeed, there are no previews for SRAM saves, only for SaveState. If you are trying to load savestates from older versions, they are not compatible anymore because of important changes in the emulation core. In-game saves ("SRAM") does not depend on the emulator and remains therefore compatible.

What is sure is that you can't get a blank screen by just loading a SRAM file as it does not affect the game until it tries to read internal saves data, while loading an incompatible SaveState corrupts the whole emulation state and can lead to program crash or locked into undefined state.

I had this problem too, but turns out that older genplusgx used the .zip file name for the .sav file, and then the newer version switched over to the roms filename in the .zip for the .sav. So the save file isn't gone, and it's still compatible, it just needs to be renamed. (Easier than when the really old versions switched from using a string of hex values for the savefile name to the rom name and I had to hex edit the sav files to figure out what they contained :P)

For example, I had a Phantasy Star 4 rom "Phantasy Star 4.zip" with a .sav "Phantasy Star 4.sav". The rom was called "Phantasy Star 4 (fixed).bin" because I had applied some patch to it, and when I loaded it in the newer Genplusgx, it created "Phantasy Star 4 (fixed).sav", and I presumed all was lost. But all I had to do was rename "Phantasy Star 4.sav" to "Phantasy Star 4 (fixed).sav" to match with the romname. Still, a little confusing to figure out at first.

@ Gukid: Thanks, that cleared it up, actually. For some weird reason GenPlus was naming gamesaves as "Shining Force II (USA.sram" instead of "Shining Force II (USA).sram" to match the title of the .rom file. I'm so happy to have this gamesave back - I only put about ten or twenty hours into it, but this game is pretty immense so I would have hated to backtrack.

@ Ekeeke: Just to clarify your questions, I am using whatever the most current build of Genplus is on the Homebrew Browser. I understand about being unclear - my apologies. I could see my save-states (as .srams) in the browser, but only when I chose the option "Load Game>From SDcard", and not from the in-game "Load/Save" menu. I believe that the reason I was getting a blank screen was that I was trying (simply out of curiosities sake) to load the .sram files from the "Load Game>From SDcard" menu, so presumably Genplus was trying to load the SRAMS as roms? The program never crashed, I was merely greeted with a blank screen until I realized that nothing was going to happen and backed out to the menu.

Either way, many thanks to the both of you for your help!

The saves (as well as cheat, snapshots, etc) filenames are off course associated to the ROM filename but there is a bug which does not extract the file extension correctly if it is less than 3 characters (for example, no problem with .bin or .gen but with .md ROM files, it will omit the last character). The bug existed in previous versions as well but since I was using the .zip filename in case of zipped ROM (which most people are using), it would not be noticeable. I am now indeed using the ROM file name and extension (not the zipped file) so I can detect between master system & genesis ROM files...

This is fixed in current SVN but until the new version, you can fix this by changing your ROM files extensions from .md to .bin .
or simply rename your old .srm file to match the name of the new one (you should have 2 .srm files for that game in your saves directory, the one with the last character cutted is the most recent one, while the other one is your old save). First solution is better since in the next version, this will be fixed and using the old filename again.

To your last point, SRAM & SaveStates are not meant to be loaded from the "Load ROM" browser because off course, they are not "ROMS" so don't do it ;-)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/04/2011 01:11AM by ekeeke.