MiSTer FPGA Forum

• Yoshi's Island
• Super Mario RPG
• Kirby Super Star
• Kirby's Dreamland 3
• Marvelous

bry111 wrote: ↑Fri Jul 24, 2020 12:44 am There are definitely SNES games that cartridge SRAM as work RAM. At least a few special chip games.

SD2SNES / FXPak Pro explicitly checksums ROMS (since firmware 1.9.0) to detect whether it's known to use part of its SRAM as work RAM, and if so only checks for changes to a game-specific subset of SRAM to determine whether there are changes worth saving.

The current list of games it checks for (across various revisions/regions, even a couple translation hacks) is

• Yoshi's Island
• Super Mario RPG
• Kirby Super Star
• Kirby's Dreamland 3
• Marvelous

It's not ideal to have game-specific handling, but maybe they figured it would be only a little extra work to reduce SD card wear for some fairly popular games.

AtomicShroom wrote: ↑Mon Mar 08, 2021 4:43 pm

bry111 wrote: ↑Fri Jul 24, 2020 12:44 am There are definitely SNES games that cartridge SRAM as work RAM. At least a few special chip games.

SD2SNES / FXPak Pro explicitly checksums ROMS (since firmware 1.9.0) to detect whether it's known to use part of its SRAM as work RAM, and if so only checks for changes to a game-specific subset of SRAM to determine whether there are changes worth saving.

The current list of games it checks for (across various revisions/regions, even a couple translation hacks) is

• Yoshi's Island
• Super Mario RPG
• Kirby Super Star
• Kirby's Dreamland 3
• Marvelous

It's not ideal to have game-specific handling, but maybe they figured it would be only a little extra work to reduce SD card wear for some fairly popular games.

This seems to be how Nintendo’s SNES Classic works as well. If you hack it and add “regular” games to it, normally the SRAM saves fine, however if you add a SA-1 game that it wasn’t programmed to recognize, like Marvelous, the SRAM never saves.

MisterGlock wrote: ↑Sun May 23, 2021 4:59 am

AtomicShroom wrote: ↑Mon Mar 08, 2021 4:43 pm

bry111 wrote: ↑Fri Jul 24, 2020 12:44 am There are definitely SNES games that cartridge SRAM as work RAM. At least a few special chip games.

SD2SNES / FXPak Pro explicitly checksums ROMS (since firmware 1.9.0) to detect whether it's known to use part of its SRAM as work RAM, and if so only checks for changes to a game-specific subset of SRAM to determine whether there are changes worth saving.

The current list of games it checks for (across various revisions/regions, even a couple translation hacks) is

• Yoshi's Island
• Super Mario RPG
• Kirby Super Star
• Kirby's Dreamland 3
• Marvelous

It's not ideal to have game-specific handling, but maybe they figured it would be only a little extra work to reduce SD card wear for some fairly popular games.

This seems to be how Nintendo’s SNES Classic works as well. If you hack it and add “regular” games to it, normally the SRAM saves fine, however if you add a SA-1 game that it wasn’t programmed to recognize, like Marvelous, the SRAM never saves.

Would this be the reason a modified rom only saves my level progression but not my lives (SMB rom)?

FeelsDuckMan wrote: ↑Sun Dec 19, 2021 10:07 pm How difficult would it be to modify the FPGA source files to auto save the SRAM on write? Would this be a major change? I don't know any FPGA programming, I'm familiar with C but this is out of my scope. If this is a simple thing to do, would someone please supply the changes necessary so it would be possible to compile a custom core that has this feature? Thanks.

Zagreatandini wrote: ↑Tue Dec 14, 2021 2:20 pm I ran uodate_all and it gave me new nes and snes cores (prob others too) that wouldn’t run games and the auto save feature was greyed out. Nes now boots the disc drive menu for some reasons (fixed it by removing the boot.rom in the folder) and the snes wouldn’t play games like chrono cross, dk1-2, star fox ect. Luckily I had a backup of my original sd mister card so I copied over the “_consoles” folder and overwrote what update_all script just totally screwed me over on. Lost all my save states too.

Anyway long story short, to fix the snes auto save feature I booted up star fox 2 to make sure I have the old snes core and it booted up perfectly (same with dk1-2 and chrono cross). Once it ran star fox 2 I hit f12 to access the snes core menu and auto save was selectable and I turned it on and hit save backup ram. Then I booted up SMW and bam! I was no longer greyed out and I played though until the save option in SMW came up and hit save then turned off the mister, turned back on and went back into the snes core and loaded up SMW and there it was my save file. Although I did lose all my other saves

I’m not sure if uodate_all screwed this all up but that’s all I did and then I had all these issues. I also had the “thyspion” enabled in update_all so I disabled that in case that’s what caused the issue but last time I ran update_all it completely screwed up my megacd and tg16 cdrom cores to the point where it wouldn’t load games and just selecting megacd would put it into this odd loop and tg16 cdrom would Just refuse to load anything up. Not sure I want to hit update_all every again tbh.

Does anyone know how I could manually add the feature to just auto save to the SD card when SRAM is written to? Just about every console flashcart does this automatically and I've never had an issue with cards and they're so cheap at this point I really don't care as I don't believe it's even an issue. I'd just like this ability myself but unsure of how to add it. I remember reading a post that someone made the modification but never stated how. Is there a fork somewhere of this feature?