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Thread: D: Randomly lost data on VMU in controller 2 ;;

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    Unhappy D: Randomly lost data on VMU in controller 2 ;;

    I've been playing and testing out games on my DC recently as I recently got an Akura box. After playing an old copy of the next tetris online, and going back to the main screen I noticed all the data was removed for some reason. Is there any way to recover this data?? I've been figuring out how to even back up saves from the VMU but I can never find how or where to get an SD adapter. I had some nice saves there and i tHINK MY BOMBERMAN SAVE WAS THERE OH WHY IS THIS GAME SO CRUEL TO ME

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    I think Dreamshell can be used to copy VMU saves. There would be other options but that might be the cheaper & easier way of doing what you want.

    Edit:
    I'll leave an example ebay listing here so I don't have to look for it again...
    http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Sega-Drea...IAAOSw7GRZFEX4


    Hopefully Zorlon will pop in at some point and post in this thread with some help, he knows a lot about DC stuff
    Last edited by deadlegion; 17th-September-2017 at 06:12.

    Spoiler warning:

  3. #3
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    A bit costly for those SD adaptors now

    An issue that may come up though is that not all SD cards will work but this is due to the software as older versions of the SD software will work with more cards

    Yeah you can just copy saves from one VMU to another or to a memcard I also use a SD adaptor that I got for less than a £5 but this was when they first started doing those, not that hard to wire in your own as well though if you feel you can do that yourself

    There are other back up options though to PC but these are not cheaper and will require older hardware PC side as well, I have Nexus Memcard that was designed to do this but that uses a Printer type serial port to copy the data through plus those are hard to find or at least my memcard is there is a smaller one but that is still around £15 and uses old cables that newer PC hardware does not support

    I would say that an SD is still the cheapest option

    Yet to try save backups on my newer Dreamcast setup that uses a USB HDD instead of a GD-Rom drive but I am sure I would be able o backup saves to the HDD (that is not a cheap device though, worth it but not cheap)

    Dream Explorer is maybe the only option that you have that might and that is a big might be able to restore data, is also backup software to PC but again you need extra things to do that that are not cheap in the slightest but it can also compress saves to be restored later along with other handy stuff

    https://bswirl.kitsunet.org/vmutool/...?lg=en&menu=on

    if anything though they also have tons of saves so you should be able to at least use complete saves from them if that is what you lost
    Last edited by Zorlon; 17th-September-2017 at 08:07.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Zorlon View Post
    A bit costly for those SD adaptors now

    An issue that may come up though is that not all SD cards will work but this is due to the software as older versions of the SD software will work with more cards

    Yeah you can just copy saves from one VMU to another or to a memcard I also use a SD adaptor that I got for less than a £5 but this was when they first started doing those, not that hard to wire in your own as well though if you feel you can do that yourself

    There are other back up options though to PC but these are not cheaper and will require older hardware PC side as well, I have Nexus Memcard that was designed to do this but that uses a Printer type serial port to copy the data through plus those are hard to find or at least my memcard is there is a smaller one but that is still around £15 and uses old cables that newer PC hardware does not support

    I would say that an SD is still the cheapest option

    Yet to try save backups on my newer Dreamcast setup that uses a USB HDD instead of a GD-Rom drive but I am sure I would be able o backup saves to the HDD (that is not a cheap device though, worth it but not cheap)

    Dream Explorer is maybe the only option that you have that might and that is a big might be able to restore data, is also backup software to PC but again you need extra things to do that that are not cheap in the slightest but it can also compress saves to be restored later along with other handy stuff

    https://bswirl.kitsunet.org/vmutool/...?lg=en&menu=on

    if anything though they also have tons of saves so you should be able to at least use complete saves from them if that is what you lost
    Thank you for replying.

    Guess I'll have to get an SD adapter then. I can only find them on eBay and the price are okay, but are mainly from outside the US/Canada (I live in the US).

    I've heard about the HDD mod as well as the USB and the SD to GDRom mods. I stick with CDs lol.
    I've actually only have one PC that is in use as a small home server that has a 25-pin parallel port for printers. Weirdly enough my "recording" dell win xp machine does not. I saw one that costs 15 bucks on ebay http://www.ebay.com/itm/nexus-sega-D...oAAOSwAc1Zrs3Y

    Brought a memory card (not a VMU) recently on amazon as I am running out of space.

    I've actually used Dream Explorer an extremely long time ago, so I took out that disc, and left anything but the "formatted" VMU. I cannot figure out how to recover data, but I've noticed that most of the saved info shows up on the Hexeditor, but then again I have no way to transfer to an SD or somewhere to a PC atm (that's why I'm looking around for that lol).

    My brother and I's chao garden can never be replaced by someone's cheap completed save state :p

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    Unfortunately from the top of my head I don't remember how to hex a save from hidden to shown status but what is left may be more of a system file that would be hidden anyway, if you can find out what hex needs to be changed you may be able to restore something as Dream Explorere does let you hex VMU/Memcard files directly

    The extra slots Dream Explorer offers also comes in handy but if you had been using that, that may of caused an issue with the game you had been playing and caused it to wipe data, though can't claim to of ever lost VMU data and I have used the extra slots for a very long time

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    Quote Originally Posted by Zorlon View Post
    Unfortunately from the top of my head I don't remember how to hex a save from hidden to shown status but what is left may be more of a system file that would be hidden anyway, if you can find out what hex needs to be changed you may be able to restore something as Dream Explorere does let you hex VMU/Memcard files directly
    Ah I see. I will have to do my research when I have some time. I just wanted to play, not have to do much work. rip

    Quote Originally Posted by Zorlon View Post
    The extra slots Dream Explorer offers also comes in handy but if you had been using that, that may of caused an issue with the game you had been playing and caused it to wipe data, though can't claim to of ever lost VMU data and I have used the extra slots for a very long time
    I think teen-old me back then thought it was great to enable that feature using that same disc copy that I still have, since both 2 VMUs have that enabled. I guess either Crazy Taxy 2, the next tetris online (has no music idk why, prob old bad rip from 8 years ago as VGA is not patched), or tetris 4d caused it idk actually. It was so random. Was about to play Space channel 5 until I noticed this issue.

    Also, I have a Gameshark thing since forever and I noticed an interesting pinout inside. Anything special?
    Here's some pics https://imgur.com/a/pRYJ9

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    yeah a lot of more recent rips have been done with a lot more quality of play back.

    Though CD-R's are not the best option, it's not the worst either, most games will run sweet from CD-R anyway with only a few that have issues with FMV or other slow data streaming (Crazy Taxi as an example does not load the map fast enough at times from CD-R so occasionally the road textures are not loaded in time or buildings seem to just pop up, for FMV there was only one game I can think of that I never got to run smoothly for FMV is Who Wants to be a Millionaire though I made an improved rip it still had a small amount of FMV lag) there is also the issue with the drive sound reading the CD-R's even with most the newer rips dampening this by moving the bigger streamed data closer to the inside of the disc as data is read quicker from the inside of the CD-R vs the outside

    I do have some of my RIPs up on the main site as well as all the more modern RIPs I had anyway, some of my RIP's are for 99min CD-R though all the ones I done anyway are improved RIP's for example I have a RIP of Grandia II that is on 3 80min CD-R's but has nothing down sampled or removed but all other rips of that game down sample the FMV, the original game is on a single GD-ROM

    The GameShark looks like it has a serial data pinout, not that unusual for devices by the original company to have there devices not to have the external output by have the pinout to have one anyway, I guess it might be possible to dump and restore with it, I am guessing the gameshark hardware is just a memcard though, or a simple access dongle or a bit of both, I don't know enough about the device to actually know though

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