GameCubeHomebrew / GameSave-Exploits

Swiss Boot Memory Cards and Game Save Hacks a la GCMM
https://GCHomebrew.com/gamesave-exploits/
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Q&A: How to write Game Saves to SD rather than Game Cube Memory Card? #17

Closed coolaj86 closed 3 years ago

coolaj86 commented 3 years ago

How do I gamesave directly to my sd card instead of getting a gamecube memory card? \ It's not even expensive so that's not an issue but surely there's a way to save directly to the sd card? \ I'm using the sd media launcher to use swiss to play games, but is there a way I can emulate a memory card in the other slot, so that it'll save and read progress from the sd card that I already have in there for games? \ I'm talking about the bigger sd card that can actually hold games and not the slow 2gb card needed to boot into swiss.

You can't.

Point 1: The GameCube doesn't have an Operating System. The entire software aside from the IPL (the boot loader) lives on the game DVD. Therefore, you can't hack the OS to rewrite gamesaves to the SD card because there is no OS to hack. The game contains the software that writes to the card, directly on the DVD / ISO. To get around this, each game would individually have to be hacked to write to the SD card.

Point 2: You can use any size card with Swiss. Even booting Swiss via Action Replay you can still use a large size card in the SD2SP2 and Swiss will prefer that over the card in Slot B (I think this is configurable in the swiss.ini).

Point 3: Game Saves are measured in KB. SD cards are measured in GB. SD cards are literally a MILLION times bigger (or a billion times bigger if you're comparing large SDs to small GC cards). So, if you could use an SD for game saves (which you can't), the smallest possible card you could find would hold more gamesaves that you could ever hope to create in your lifetime.

Technically someone could create an SD adapter that emulates a memory card... but it would have to have a Xilinx chip and cost $100 and no one would do that except for fun - and most people have better fun to have. :)