I’m totally new to retroarch and emulation. I’m using retroarch on my ps3 cfw and playing the classic pokemon emerald.
I know cheats are not possible in retroarch so I tried to use my gamesave (.srm) from retroarch to open in VBA 1.8.0 so that I can use some gameshark cheats. It seems VBA only reads (.sgm/.sav). Renamed the files and still get the error.
Are there ways to import cheat gamesaves to retroarch & vice versa?
I too would like to know if this is possible.
it should definitely be possible so long as it is a game save and not a save state. Also you might wanna check and see what the filetype suffix is (eg. file.sav etc.) when using retroarch. There is a save tool for pokemon which I know can change between different save types used by emus and the actual gba itself, so make sure the one from vba and retroarch have the same filetype first of all.
second your gonna want to tell retroarch where to load save files from in the config. If not it will default load from the same place that the rom is. You’ll have to fill in the details yourself with google but that should clear things up.
So it looks like retroarch on my droid uses .srm files that are 136kb. VBA on the pc uses .sav or .sg1 that are 128kb after changing to SRAM 128kb. From here simply changing file extension does not work. Any ideas?
Bump. I’m also looking for a way to convert these save files. I’m playing Pokemon FireRed and there are pokemons that won’t evolve not unless you trade them. There are no cheats at retroarch right now and also no link play so I can’t trade with other people so the solution that I came up with is to convert the save file to another emulator and do either the cheat or trade and convert it back to retroarch but it doesn’t work by just changing the file name extension.
I tried to do something similar with the GBA save files that mednafen on the PC makes. They are smaller than the ones that Retroarch Android makes and are not compatible. If you run Retroarch on both platforms you can then copy the saves between platforms.
As I said there is a tool you can use to change the save type. Simply modifying the extension by hand will not cut it. I don’t have all the details memorized which is why I referenced you to google for it. I think it is a tool called pokesav or something similar. If you really wanna do it though, you will have to find out yourself the details. Nobody is gonna do the research for you, but it really shouldn’t be that hard.
Mednafen compresses saves and savestates by default. You can turn that off with the cfg file setting filesys.disablesavegz 1. I think if you do that, then load a game with a compressed save and save in game, it will uncompress it.
Mednafen compresses saves and savestates by default. You can turn that off with the cfg file setting filesys.disablesavegz 1. I think if you do that, then load a game with a compressed save and save in game, it will uncompress it.[/quote]
Thanks for the info. Gave it a go. Unfortunately even with compression turned off the save files that mednafen creates are smaller than those that Retroarch creates:
139264 bytes = retroarch 65536 bytes = mednafen
I dont know exactly what I did but I was able to convert srm to sav. I downloaded VBA on windows. I transfered my srm file to windows and then renamed the file extension to sav. I did trial and error of import/export option while messing with the save type option and I was able to changed the file size of sav to 128k. I loaded pokemon firered and at first it showed something like file corrupted and will revert back to previous save. And Baam. I was able to access my save on VBA with a sav file of 128k. I really don’t know how exactly I did it so I’ll keep trying to figure out the steps. I’ll post back once I know how. I copied back the sav file to my android and it works with my boy emulator.
I haven’t tried playing the sav file with retroarch. I think I saw a way to convert sav to srm files somewhere. I’ll try in the morning if I’ll be able to play it back with retroarch.