Pokemon Crystal [GBC]: Is my corrupted file restorable?

[DaltonSR20DET]

Hey all, I'm new here but found this forum trying to research if my Pokemon Crystal save file is salvageable.

So I have an original/official Crystal cart back from 2001 and it still has the original button battery in it and has only been played using an official gameboy color.  2 years ago, I turned the game on and tried to load my save file to which it says is corrupted and the bottom says "TIME NOT SET".  The game sat on my shelf since.  I finally got myself a Epilogue Game Operator which allowed me to create a .sav file straight from the game, however, PKHex doesn't open the .sav saying its corrupted but my other pokemon .sav files (Ruby, Red & Green) does open in PKHex.

Looks like I will have to change the battery no matter what but after I change the battery and wipe my game, will my .sav transfer back and be functional with the RTC fixed or is my .sav totally screwed?

 

 

 

Pokemon - Crystal Version (USA, Europe) (Rev A).sav

[theSLAYER]

13 hours ago, DaltonSR20DET said:

Hey all, I'm new here but found this forum trying to research if my Pokemon Crystal save file is salvageable.

So I have an original/official Crystal cart back from 2001 and it still has the original button battery in it and has only been played using an official gameboy color.  2 years ago, I turned the game on and tried to load my save file to which it says is corrupted and the bottom says "TIME NOT SET".  The game sat on my shelf since.  I finally got myself a Epilogue Game Operator which allowed me to create a .sav file straight from the game, however, PKHex doesn't open the .sav saying its corrupted but my other pokemon .sav files (Ruby, Red & Green) does open in PKHex.

Looks like I will have to change the battery no matter what but after I change the battery and wipe my game, will my .sav transfer back and be functional with the RTC fixed or is my .sav totally screwed?

 

 

 

Pokemon - Crystal Version (USA, Europe) (Rev A).sav 32 kB · 0 downloads

If PKHeX won’t read it, then chances are it doesn’t have a save inside it.

I can take a look later, but this is not looking good

 

Edit: Looking at the Box data alone (based on box data offsets in a regular save, then transplanted it into my save), it doesn't look right:


As a last ditch effort, can you give me the exact trainer name? Including capitalization and symbols (if any)

[DaltonSR20DET]

Hey, thanks soooo much for lookin' into this. The Trainer Name should be "PHILL" (in all caps) but I don't know nor remember what the trainer id or money in the wallet, its been way too long.

Edited July 15, 2022 by DaltonSR20DET

[theSLAYER]

14 hours ago, DaltonSR20DET said:

Hey, thanks soooo much for lookin' into this. The Trainer Name should be "PHILL" (in all caps) but I don't know nor remember what the trainer id or money in the wallet, its been way too long.

I Gen 2 encoding, "PHILL" is 8F 87 88 8B 8B

I tried searching for that and:


It appeared a couple of times. Some data might be in there. I'll need to dig more.

EDIT: Yeah it's not looking any good. PKX extractor dumped a bunch of nonsense from your save too.
Is there a Pokemon you're sure is there? Maybe I could looking for it?

EDIT2: This is what you potentially could have had in your party. Is this correct?

Size: 6
Member 1: Magikarp
Member 2: Vaporeon
Member 3: Eevee
Member 4: Gyarados
Member 5: Scizor
Member 6: Bellsprout


Data structure reference, List reference

 

Edit again: Once again, trying to import even one party mon seems useless. It seems that all the mon data may be scrambled to begin with..

[DaltonSR20DET]

Eevee and Vaporeon were likely but don't remember the exact party of 6. I know i trained all 6 Eevee evolutions to lvl 100.

I thought maybe they would be my current party
EEVEE
VAPOREON
JOLTEON
FLAREON
ESPEON
UMBREON

not sure if I gave them nicknames at all
but I know I raised all 6 to to level 100
all from level 5 (eggs)

[theSLAYER]

Yeah the party data look garbled to me

[DaltonSR20DET]

eek, yeah looks like this is probably a total loss... I'll swap the battery just so it has a good one but again, thanks so much for even taking the time to look inside the file to find out whats going on.

Not sure what caused the corruption in the first place but very discouraged to dump the time back into a new game file after loosing this one with somewhere between 200-300 hours put in.

[ZebAztian]

Hey

i have a corrupted file too. 
i cant load it into Pkhx… can someone may help if the save can be restored?

As far as I remember i catched 228 from 251 Pokémon incl Suicune.

my trainername was Seb,SEB or Nina but none of those values have been found via HEX

thank you

Pokemon - Kristall-Edition (Germany).sav

Edited October 3, 2022 by ZebAztian