devkitPro

HI. Greetings.

I'm writing a small game program that I'd like to keep high scores on. I've read, on a separate note, about copying the saved states for the games you already have over to a ".sav" file for use on your slot-1 device. This is always for commercially produced games. I'm guessing that these techniques actually copy info from the eeprom. Here's my question.

If you have a slot-1 device, like an acekard2, and you write your own homebrew game, is there any way of making a ".sav" file for your game so that it acts just like other games with ".sav" files?

After reading posts on this forum and searching around the net I am interested in a way to do this. I've read that you can read and write directly to the eeprom via the functions in card.h. I tried the example program, called eeprom.nds, on my Acekard2 and got what I suspect is garbage. I don't know what that means. Was I seeing something that was encrypted or maybe some of the contents of the flash card? I don't have another game to try out

Thanks for your time.

Well... my game actually uses a double (triple?) approach:

- If there is a filesystem I can use, I go for it immediately, without even questioning it (scores are saved on a BITSWP.sco file at root);
- If there isn't, I attempt to write to EEPROM (I built a class specifically designed for that), without caring how the underlying hardware stores that data;
- If everything above fails, I simply do *not* keep scores of any kind.

It works for me . I don't actually worry about any implications of mixed storage here; you don't usually exchange card media while playing games like these.

Hope you find it useful.

So getting specific to my situation... when you write to the eeprom, and you have an acekard2 like I do, does the hardware automatically write to a .sav file? What will an emulator like desmume or no$gba do?

Hard to say, since I don't actually own an acekard. However, if you have one of those, and can load .nds apps without making use of a SD card, you can always download my game to see what happens: http://dsotaku.drunkencoders.com/Bitswe ... weeper.zip

Either that, or you could grab the sources, set a boolean in main() to false (effectively "disabling" filesystem support), and load the .nds normally. Your choice .

I'm not sure I know what you mean when you say; "if you have one of those, and can load .nds apps without making use of a SD card" BUT I downloaded the game and the source file... The game seems to work on my ds, but I couldn't get the source to compile. I'm using a linux system, so I had to rename the Make file (with a capital M), and then I got a lot of "XXX was not declared in this scope" errors for the MainEntryPoint.cpp file. I suppose it's an issue with what version of the toolchain I'm using. I did try to pass different arguments to the 'main' function, but since it wasn't compiling it was pretty pointless. Anyway, it's a nice game. Thanks also for replying to my post.

PS. How high a score in Bitsweeper do you have to get before it saves yours as a high score?