Crystal Save (via MiSTer FPGA) won't open.

[dav3yb]

I've been playing through Crystal (no hacks) on a MiSTer FPGA system.  It seems the save files it make are too large for PKHeX to open, or to even upload to an official cartridge.  

 

Below is the error I get.  The game otherwise loads perfectly fine, either through emulation, or on the FGPA core.  I even tried applying an official dump of the BIOS from the gameboy advanced gbc mode.  Still saves with this exact file size.  

 

Looking at a save file generated on mGBA that is the correct size, and comparing in a hex editor to the FPGA core, it does look different, but that's as much as i can tell, lots of empty lines and very different looking data.  It seems to do fine saving games that are not Color exclusive, as my Pokemon Yellow save allowed me to edit it and re-upload just fine.  

 

I'd mainly be curious to see what it's doing vs what it SHOULD be doing (to maybe help get the core saving correctly).  I can at least confirm that it's 100% the fpga core, as I imported a save that PKHeX could read to the system, re-saved, and dumped the file, only to get the same error as below.  

 

 

Edit:  So after looking around some more, I've found a MiSTer save converter (https://savefileconverter.com/#/mister).  This will take the save and converts it to the correct size (and .srm extension for some reason?) and allows it to be viewed in PKHeX.  So there's clearly something known about how MiSTer save files are created compared to, anything else? 

 

Pokemon - Crystal Version (USA, Europe).sav

Edited September 9 by dav3yb
save converter found.

[dav3yb]

 

Found this in the MiSTer Documentation.  So likely no real fix unless the core gets updated to change how it makes certain save files.  Can probably just disregard this topic now.  

[Kaphotics]

Opens just fine if you manually trim the file in a hex editor from 0x8200 -> 0x8020 (or 0x8000, with a 0x20 RTC footer). The trailing bytes are all FF'd (aka unused).

If you then wanted to restore, you just export and hex edit the save file the opposite of above, by appending the same amount of FF's back to 0x8200 size.