Question regarding saving

I had a quick question about something I have not heard mentioned before.

I know that 'Will NESMaker be able to make x' is becoming a dreaded question, but I feel this one is valid because it is a question of hardware capabilities.

Will the physical carts we eventually get be able to handle game saving like legend of Zelda?
 

Kasumi

New member
Looks like the answer is yes. The carts are from infiniteneslives: http://infiniteneslives.com/nesmaker.php
Supports mapper 30 flash saves so passwords are not needed to save game play progress
 

Kasumi

New member
The question was just if the cartridge one gets with the flasher would support saving.

As far as I can tell the NES Maker software doesn't yet provide anything to help with saving. So you'd have to read Mapper 30's documentation and add the functionality yourself right now. I'm sure software support is planned for the future, though, because it's a feature of the cartridge.
 

MrElephant

Member
Hello Kasumi,

I appreciate you writing back, but I fail to understand setting up a different thread just to ask a simple question. Yes, the original question was about flasher saver support, but how can we even approach this stage without having the ability of saving in the first place? Reading the Mapper 30 documentation would be a waste for a person like me, whose asm ability is about equal to those of an earthworms-I'd probably get lost in the first sentence. In conclusion- setting up a new topic would just be spamming the forum, and why have multiple threads-when a person can just read one post, and retrieve all of the information in one place?

Thanks again for the assistance.

-MrElephant
 

Kasumi

New member
I didn't mean you should create a new topic. Still, the only way to set it up if you have no assembly language knowledge is to wait for it be implemented by someone. It's not as simple as games that save with a battery. I'll try to see if I can figure it out from the FCEUX source code, since the explanation on the wiki isn't so hot.

Edit: Nevermind, there's a nice code example that I missed the link to on the wiki. It turns out the explanation on the wiki is fine, it's just very, very different from most mappers I'm used to.

It's a pretty wild system. With battery saves, it's basically like write to "extra" RAM and you're done. And the way to write to extra RAM is the same as writing to "regular" RAM. This requires a sequence of like 8 writes where most things need three at most (like updating a single "graphical" byte needs 3). And the code for this apparently needs to executed from RAM, it's actually a bit scary to think about and I've been doing this a long time. :eek:

The good news is there's kind of already a library for it which is the nice code example I mentioned: https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/images/f/fa/Flash.asm.txt

It's there if anyone that comes across this topic feels like attempting it.

Edit2: Actually now that I'm thinking about it MMC1 is five writes to swap, and reading the controller is two writes then 8 reads so what this is doing isn't totally out of the ordinary. The code apparently needing to be in RAM is still odd, though. Anyway, forgive my rantings, it was just quite interesting.
 
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