GBA Core porting to Mister

[BitsNStuff]

PLEASE DELETE

[BitsNStuff]

PLEASE DELETE

[BitsNStuff]

Working here with GBA_20200222 and Main Mister from earlier this year and Foldername "01. Now playing"

Files inside can be seen, too. Only File extensions visible are .gb, .gbc and .gba

Ah, I thought it was the GBA core due to what I'd found.

Having read what you've said I've gone back and tested the menu and MiSTer files. It looks like it's something to do with MiSTer_20200311 that caused the issue as with menu_20200115.rbf (The latest release) and MiSTer_20200308 (The one before the latest release) it displays as it used to.

I didn't see how it could be releated but just to check I went back to the latest MiSTer release and removed the names.txt file as that was part of the last update but it doesn't make any difference not having that text file there or not, as you'd expect.

EDIT:
Sorry, not sure what happened with the multiple duplicate posts.

[BitsNStuff]

PLEASE DELETE

[deltax5]

Ya i was telling them on discord about this.
If you have a space example (01. whatever) it doesn't show anything in the folder. Which kinda scared me cuz i put files in there i didn't back up, was revealed that it was still there. If you put (01.whatever) without space only the 01 will show up and the contents will atleast show, sometimes it will show up for example my 02.translations shows up full but not (01.hacks) just 01.
This is only the gba core. The gameboy core i tried worked fine.

[Sorgelig]

i've pushed the fix in Main for folder names.

[BitsNStuff]

i've pushed the fix in Main for folder names.

That was quick. Thank you.

[12characters]

vscale_mode=1

This is not related to topic.

The uses of vscale_border and vscale_mode=1 are not interlinked, but if one does not want to fit the picture to the screen then one could just as well use integer scaling. Since some recent update, it seems however that they can no longer be combined. It seems vscale_border only takes effect if vscale_mode=0. It is not a huge issue, but it would be nice to have a possibility of defining a smaller integer as scaling factor.

[Peredonov]

I'm encountering a strange issue when trying to use a save file generated by an Everdrive X5 to the GBA core. I've been playing some Mother 3 and the EDX5 stored the save file as a .fla file. I renamed it .sav for the MiSTer GBA core and it can load it, however the content is from when I saved about 4 hours into the game, even though it's supposed to be 14 hours into the game. It's as if it's loading an old save file, though I just re-saved it on the flashcart before moving it to the saves folder in the MiSTer SD card.

Any ideas on what could be going wrong here? My only guess is that the EDX5 uses ".srm fo sram, .eep for eeprom, and .fla for flash", but the GBA core uses .sav for SRAM? Or maybe I should try renaming it to .srm, but the GBA core seems to be generating .sav by default (same size as the .fla file, 66 KB).

[FPGAzumSpass]

GBA core uses .sav for all savetypes.
So renaming to .sav is correct, everything else will not work.

You can have
- 8 Kbyte for both EEprom sizes (it's always using the larger one, even for 512Byte EEprom)
- 32Kbyte for Sram
- 64 and 128kbyte for Flash

There might be some bytes added for RTC data if the game uses RTC (mother 3 does not)

However, 66Kbyte is always wrong. I'm not sure if there was data added at beginning or end.
What probably happens here, is that the data beyond 64kbytes is overwriting the start.

The game itself seems to use a shadowcopy, in case the flash gets corrupted, so you still have old saves. Not sure how many of them are inside, but as i don't believe you played 10 hours straight, it's probably more than 2 savegames inside.
In any case, it cannot have unlimited slots, so i would recommend this:

- start on your everdrive
- save a few times ingame, maybe 5 times (don't know that game, i hope it's possible and won't take long)
- save to your everdrive
- copy to mister and rename to .sav

If my assumption is right, the savegame that can be loaded on mister will then be overwritten by a current savegame, as hopefully all shadowcopys are also current now.

If that doesn't work (please try it first), you can upload the savegame and i can try to fix it, or at least see how the everdrive modifes the original savedata.

[Peredonov]

@FPGAzumSpass Thanks for the info and suggestions!

I think I figured it out. The Everdrive keeps a larger "rambckup01.fla" file that I guess it uses for games loaded via fast load (pressing START on the ED menu to load the last played game), and probably also when loading the game from the "recently played" list. It only saves the backup RAM when loading the game manually from the directory list. The last time I did that must have been when I was 4 hours into the game, hence what I experienced earlier.

Oh and the 66 KB file size is just what MacOS Finder reports, probably inaccurately.

I did also try saving five times like you suggested, but I'm pretty sure the key was just to load the game manually to make the ED save the backup RAM to the save file.

Hopefully this will help others who want to move over from real hardware to the GBA core. I've been playing on a GBA Consolizer, but sound feels cleaner on the GBA core, and there's also more LCD filter options, so I'll probably continue on the core.

BTW, if you haven't played Mother 3, I highly recommend that you do so! I'm only playing it for the first time and not done yet, but I'm already suspecting it may be one of the best games of all time for me. At the very least the soundtrack is something that anyone would agree is outstanding.

[solo20]

on metroid zero when i paues the screen flickers i see a a green flash but it goes away fast also to cause it to flicker bad i paues game then press (L) look at video download so you can see what i mean on hdmi its not as bad as my crt . is there anything i can do to fix it in ini setting

https://easyupload.io/ylx507

[FPGAzumSpass]

Are you sure, that you have "sync to core" activated?

This feature should probably be activated by default...

[solo20]

thank you that was the problem FPGAzumSpass it was off by default i turn it on no more flicker

[FPGAzumSpass]

Very good.

Yes it is off by default, but i think we should make it on by default, as i don't see any reason keeping this off, other than speedrunning maybe.
(it reduces the games speed by a very tiny amount, e.g. only when you had the flickering)