EZ-Flash USA Forum

Hi,

is it possible to read the name a the game from a Savegame file ?

Trying to figure out the format of the file, but not getting anywhere.
I see some save editors. so i guess there must be some info on how a savefile it built up.

To my knowledge every save game is unique or has the potential to be and unlike a lot of stuff there is no header or similar section to save games on the DS (I can not speak for stuff the datel devices which add the save onto their own data which can include stuff).
However a quick poll of saves from my cart says many of them have some identifiable ASCII at the start of the save
mario2d= New super mario brothers
Mario kart-> MKDS
Dragon Quest 9 had DQ9
Several others had simple text strings that could be useful.
Others had nothing at all though.

Beyond that you also have data within the save- character names and such (Civilisation DS had a bunch of ASCII text that is unique when taken as a whole to the game) as well as the option of making a save from a pool of games you suspect it could be and comparing those: while DS saves may not have a common format the same game should do.

Something to consider- EZ5 saves are presently 512K for all games unless they are larger, DS games are not however set to 512K (many are in fact considerably smaller) so it might be worth a look to see roughly where the data ends and then extrapolating a save

I must say this is quite an unusual request (I have certainly never seen such a request) and I do not think many people have really explored saves from this angle as there has never been a need to. The save editors you see usually take a complete save from a known game and work backwards.

Thank you

reason for this question, is that I want in my program the option instead of assigning Save games to games
to have it auto detected.
ie. mariokart.sav could be from myfirstpony.nds in case it got renamed.

so I wanted to see if there was something inside the save, like a the gametitle, so you know for what game it is
like a NDS that has a header with the info, and all the data comes after that.

since there is a site, where you can convert the Save files to other formats, so i assumed that there was
some kind of a structure in it.

I assume you are talking about:
http://shunyweb.info/

Quick things from memory:
Datel devices add a header of sorts to the start of the file meaning it needs to be trimmed. I just grabbed a bunch from gamefaqs (they only allow datel saves there) and they do include a good chunk of data (certainly enough to get game, cross region saves are tricky in that they sometimes work, sometimes have errors and sometimes fail to work at all) although at some level it appears to be user generated.

Most GBA slot devices use a 256KB save (the largest when they were being first made: pokemon upped this to 512 which stuck for DS slot), supercard, EZ4 and whatever else belong here.

Old EZ5 uses the same size saves as the games courtesy of a savelist, new EZ5 uses the 512K save most other carts use (ignoring naming schemes and location and you can usually use any save from any cart with any other cart).

The DSx of all things compressed these saves (mainly as some DS saves clock less than one kilobyte and a row of 20 of these 512K things takes 10 megs rather than less than 10K).

NO$GBA does something else entirely but I can not recall what right now.

Everything else is usually a variation on this theme with maybe a byte shift, flip or different values for padding data (FFFF vs 0000).

Most other systems you would be safe for although the DS is more or less a single save per game sort of thing rather than memory cards or shared memory meaning it does not really have to conform to anything. In short while I love that site by shuny all it is doing for the most part is renaming saves/extensions and padding them out.

I dare say you could write some fairly decent heuristic software from what I saw earlier but I would really hate to do it; better part of 2700 games if you ignore duplicates (which I would advise against).

i looked at a bunch of save games, but some of them have a name in it, and some of them don't.
so it's going to be hard to find something, i'll just go by name, but then so, that your still able to
select something else. don't know.. it's working fine the way it is now. have to think about it.