[Review] Linkmasta and flashmasta

[Loïc]

all game under 16 mbits have save issue.

That's less than ideal, to say the least. Is there anything that could be done on the cartridge side? Creating a patch for every single game seems like a lot of work. I know nothing of the cartridge inner workings, so I hope that Flavor can shed some light on the matter.

We did talk about Cotton before, but was there anything said about all games under 16 megabits having save issues?

That wasn't discussed here, but on flashmasta website, in the comment section.

It's technically possible to handle that hardware side, however it's not easy. Cartridge have to somehow 'emulate' different physical layout.
One way could be to add a switch on cartridge to set it in 4/8/16+ mbits compatibility mode. As I've nearly no hardware skill, I've no idea how hard it is to do that.
Other way could be software only, given the flash process could trigger 'automatically' the correct size, but it would be harder to achieve.

To handle savegame backup/restore, there's no 'simple' way. Real game cartridge have a small number of unprotected blocks. Game data are stored there.
Flash unit (Bung or Flashmasta) don't have any protected block, so savegame cannot be retrieved this way.
Some time ago, I did a dump of all the games I have (I'm still missing a few, but hey are too expensive for me ^^), with a list, for each dump, of unprotected blocks.
Backup software needs to be modified to handle those informations and write/save only unprotected blocks, but once again, this would work only for 16/32 mbits games.

Actually, I think the easiest way to handle savegame backup for all games should be software :
- use database to identify save data blocks for 16/32 mbtis games.
- patch other games on the fly at flash time, so they all write/read data on the same block (one of the last block of the 16-32 mbits range). Thus, every game not in database list could be handled the same way (maybe except for homebrew... but that's a minor problem, those can also be relocated)

Ed can correct me if I'm wrong.

Loïc.