Pokemon Emerald Revelations: savefile corrupted/deleted after Elite Four, and I'm unable to fix it

[Coolmage]

Hello.

I recently played through a romhack for Emerald called Pokemon Emerald Revelations (basically just a QOL patch, game is still fairly vanilla), but after beating the Elite 4 and the Champion, my savegame "deleted" itself with the message "The save file has been erased due to corruption or damage.", though I still managed to grab the file from gm9. From what I've been able to gather, this is because when originally making the rom into a GBA VC inject, the save that was created for it was 64 kb, while Emerald (and other Pokemon games?) requires 128 kb. I believe I have now managed to make a new GBA VC that makes 128 kb saves by using New 3DS Super Injector instead (the new save I made as a test is 128 kb at least), but I cannot fix the original save: I tried to make it into a 128 kb save using a Hex Editor (Hex Workshop) and a guide I found on another post, but trying to inject it via gm9 always results with the game stating the save was corrupted and deleted.

I'm not very knowledgeable when it comes to fixing something like this, so I'm hoping I can get some help here. Attached is the original 64 kb save, along with the 128 kb failed "fixed" save I made.

0004000000E7D700.gbavc.sav 0004000000E7D700fix_attempt.gbavc.sav

[BlackShark]

Do you have any older backup of your save file?

Unfortunately after completing the E4 the game attempted to store your Hall of Fame data. Usually this is at the end of the save file, beyond the 64kB. Since your file had no space to store it, the game overwrote save block 2 and 3 instead to store the data there. I got the save to load again, however your whole game progress is lost (you don't even have the Pokedex or badges...), because flags, variables and game stats are all saved in block 2. Your Pokemon should still all be there though.

I can only recover the two missing blocks from an older backup, if you have one.

0004000000E7D700fixed.gbavc.sav

[Coolmage]

3 hours ago, BlackShark said:

Do you have any older backup of your save file?

Unfortunately after completing the E4 the game attempted to store your Hall of Fame data. Usually this is at the end of the save file, beyond the 64kB. Since your file had no space to store it, the game overwrote save block 2 and 3 instead to store the data there. I got the save to load again, however your whole game progress is lost (you don't even have the Pokedex or badges...), because flags, variables and game stats are all saved in block 2. Your Pokemon should still all be there though.

I can only recover the two missing blocks from an older backup, if you have one.

0004000000E7D700fixed.gbavc.sav 128 kB · 0 downloads

Unfortunately I did not make any backup saves, which was pretty stupid of me in hindsight. I'm assuming it wouldn't be possible to edit in the progress from someone else's save either, so I guess this save is just gone. I learned a few things I didn't know before from this at least. Thank you for taking the time to look at it.

[BlackShark]

40 minutes ago, Coolmage said:

I'm assuming it wouldn't be possible to edit in the progress from someone else's save either

That would be possible. There could be some issues if it's not a save from this hack though.

[Coolmage]

2 hours ago, BlackShark said:

That would be possible. There could be some issues if it's not a save from this hack though.

It's worth trying at least. With the risk of asking a stupid question, where does save block 2 and 3 start (and end in the case of 3) in my save? As I understand it the blocks change places each time the game is saved, and I don't know how to locate the proper ones in the hex editor.

[theSLAYER]

1 hour ago, Coolmage said:

It's worth trying at least. With the risk of asking a stupid question, where does save block 2 and 3 start (and end in the case of 3) in my save? As I understand it the blocks change places each time the game is saved, and I don't know how to locate the proper ones in the hex editor.

The save block (or section; a term more in-line with what Bulbapedia uses, relevance being the image I’m about to share) shuffles with every save. So there isn’t a fixed location.

Source: https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Save_data_structure_(Generation_III)

The section ID (what he’s using to identify the save block numbers) can be found at every 0x??FF4 interval (?? are incremental hexadecimal values starting from 0), so if you’re into checking the data via Hex, this is how you can identify the sections.

 

[Coolmage]

On 4/13/2023 at 9:47 PM, theSLAYER said:

The save block (or section; a term more in-line with what Bulbapedia uses, relevance being the image I’m about to share) shuffles with every save. So there isn’t a fixed location.

Source: https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Save_data_structure_(Generation_III)

The section ID (what he’s using to identify the save block numbers) can be found at every 0x??FF4 interval (?? are incremental hexadecimal values starting from 0), so if you’re into checking the data via Hex, this is how you can identify the sections.

 

I'd seen that page before, but hadn't really understood what it meant, so thanks for explaining. Sadly, using other vanilla Emerald saves does as suspected not work (though it's possible I'm just doing something wrong), as it says the data has been corrupted every time I try injecting a new edited save where I've changed save sections 2 and 3. I might just start a new file and see if I can't edit in my old team and items, and then try to quickly push through the story until I reach the Elite 4 again.

[theSLAYER]

14 minutes ago, Coolmage said:

I'd seen that page before, but hadn't really understood what it meant, so thanks for explaining. Sadly, using other vanilla Emerald saves does as suspected not work (though it's possible I'm just doing something wrong), as it says the data has been corrupted every time I try injecting a new edited save where I've changed save sections 2 and 3. I might just start a new file and see if I can't edit in my old team and items, and then try to quickly push through the story until I reach the Elite 4 again.

once you cobble saves together (like a frankenstein monster), you'll need to use PKHeX to fix the checksums, before you can restore that save into a game.

Load the edited save into PKHeX, then export the edited save from PKHeX (from here on we'll call it 2), then restore 2 into a game.
Without valid checksums, the game would read the save as corrupted.