ScaryBugThing
February 20th, 2007, 10:55
After trying for about two hours last night to get past the NORG battle on Disc 2 of Final Fantasy 8, and having it always freeze when he tries to cast spells, I think I've hit a roadblock. I think it is impossible to play past this point on FF8 on the PSP alone, given the current Popstation emulator. Since I've put almost 30 hours into the game so far, I'd really really like to not have to quit my game.
After going over the options, it seems like the option most likely to work would be to somehow convert the memory card from the .DAT Popstation format to .MCR or something that ePSXe could use. If I could do that, I could at least keep playing on my PC--and if I could convert it back to .DAT format, I could then keep playing the otherwise pretty-well emulated game on my PSP past the NORG battle.
Does anyone have any idea if a .DAT to .MCR conversion utility exists? Does any programmer out there have an interest in making one?
The memory card size for .DAT files is 129 KB, and the .MCR files are 128 KB. I can't imagine they are structured too differently, but I don't know what steps Sony may have done to stop people from converting them or how hard they would be to reverse engineer. (Then again, Sony's emulator accepts processed stock ISOs right out of the box, so I am guessing they haven't made it any harder to access/convert the memory cards.)
Another option I thought may work was to use CWCheats (http://cwcheat.zioale.it/?act=download&id=1). Though I'm too new to know, it looks like there might be some .MCR memory card options for Popstation, though I can't really understand the readme or site's explanation:
"cwcheatpops (NO GAME version) features a way to import/export MCR memory cards (ePSXe and PSX) and continue your favourite games in PSX, PS2, PSP with the same savegame!"
Trying to test the PRX plugin according to the readme instructions just seemed to disable my gamepad in the PS1 emulator though.
Thanks for reading--let me know if you also think this is a good idea, or if you can help!
After going over the options, it seems like the option most likely to work would be to somehow convert the memory card from the .DAT Popstation format to .MCR or something that ePSXe could use. If I could do that, I could at least keep playing on my PC--and if I could convert it back to .DAT format, I could then keep playing the otherwise pretty-well emulated game on my PSP past the NORG battle.
Does anyone have any idea if a .DAT to .MCR conversion utility exists? Does any programmer out there have an interest in making one?
The memory card size for .DAT files is 129 KB, and the .MCR files are 128 KB. I can't imagine they are structured too differently, but I don't know what steps Sony may have done to stop people from converting them or how hard they would be to reverse engineer. (Then again, Sony's emulator accepts processed stock ISOs right out of the box, so I am guessing they haven't made it any harder to access/convert the memory cards.)
Another option I thought may work was to use CWCheats (http://cwcheat.zioale.it/?act=download&id=1). Though I'm too new to know, it looks like there might be some .MCR memory card options for Popstation, though I can't really understand the readme or site's explanation:
"cwcheatpops (NO GAME version) features a way to import/export MCR memory cards (ePSXe and PSX) and continue your favourite games in PSX, PS2, PSP with the same savegame!"
Trying to test the PRX plugin according to the readme instructions just seemed to disable my gamepad in the PS1 emulator though.
Thanks for reading--let me know if you also think this is a good idea, or if you can help!