Extracting saves from PC-Engine real hardware

[LeftEmpty]

Hello,

this question popped in my mind after a remark from Sorg on github about the Memory Base 128 save file format for the MiSTer core, making me assume there is a way to extract save date from PC-Engine.
If there is such a way, could anybody share it with me? What sort of setup and skills would be needed?
I have a lot of saves I'd love to browse again, but I wonder what sort of efforts that'd require.

Cheers!

[dshadoff]

If you are technically inclined, Chris Covell wrote a serial-port monitor program to communicate with the PC Engine, called PCEmon.
https://chrismcovell.com/PCEmon/index.html

I documented the steps required to grab backup memory here:
https://pcengine.proboards.com/thread/8 ... ore-memory

[LeftEmpty]

That's beyond my current ability, but wow, what a smart way to do it. What would us PCE lovers be, without you and Chris

Thank you very much, knowing it's feasible warms my mind already, somehow.

[beta]

If you have an everdrive, you can load up the TEOS beta firmware to backup BRAM to the sd card in the everdrive. I haven't tested it with the tennokoe 2, but it worked great with a Duo R. If the backup fails, try formatting a different SD card... it seems to be picky with cards. It'll backup to the TBED folder, but you can transfer that save file to the MiSTer and rename the relevant BRAM.bin to match the name of the game on the MiSTer (bin -> sav).

[beta]

I found the original thread on Krikzz forum with instructions and a link to the beta firmware for anyone looking later: http://krikzz.com/forum/index.php?topic=9417.0

[dshadoff]

There are a couple of links in that thread... more specifically, there is this message:
http://krikzz.com/forum/index.php?topic ... 1#msg71671.

elmer had rewritten the operating system for TurboEverdrive, to be able to back up save data to memory card. But read the notes; if I recall correctly, you will need to create backup files of the correct size to save into (the SDCard access routines could write, but not create directory entries, or allocate blocks to use as parts of files).