[solved] Berry glitch when moving Emerald saves from emulator to cart

[defomicron]

Hello- Many posts here have helped me a lot on my journey but I’m stuck now and hoping someone can help.

(revised for clarity) (solved i think)

Situation is I don’t have any GBA consoles and I’m working on a Gen III living dex. I have a DS Lite and a DS flash cart so I am able to copy and replace save files on the Gen III cartridges.

I am trying to trade a second starter from Ruby onto my main playthrough, which is on Emerald. I am able to successfully copy the save files and complete the trade, however, whenever I try to copy the new Emerald save file onto the cartridge, I lose all berries.

I’ve used PKHex and a DS flashcart tool to adjust the RTC, but no matter what I’ve tried the berries do not come back. I’ve tried with mGBA and vba-m, the latter with and without RTC enabled.

Fortunately, I am able to revert to the save file from before the trade, and berries do come back. So if this isn’t possible it isn’t the end of the journey. Thank you for any help you might be able to give!

 

Edit: Searched some different terms here today and found people with similar issues. I was able to fix this in the dumbest way possible: changing my PC’s time to match the battery’s time (August 24, 2001!) and then using vba-m with RTC enabled. Moved the save back to the cart and it still works!

I recommend anyone starting a new game on a Gen III cartridge to go ahead and set the battery date to today’s date before starting the game. This completely mitigates the issue with moving saves back and forth from emulators and cartridges.

Edited May 3, 2021 by defomicron