I re-grouped here all the questions I got on gbaemu and gbatemp board, plus some others that I thought deserved to be clarified. This faqs is for all version of Sram Explorer - What is pogoshell? That's offf the subject; go here : http://digilander.libero.it/pogofaq - Does Sram Explorer work with pogoshell 2.0 Sram Explorer 2.0 work with pogoshell 2.0, and Sram Explorer 1.x work with pogoshell 1.x Now the two version evolve in parallel, that why you can still have some 1.x release after the 2.0 release (like I did for the 1.4) - What is a dump file? What I call a .dump (or Sram dump) is the file you get when you backup your 4 Sram banks in one file (usually you had to select the bank 0 with 256k as the size in your flashing program). I didn't refer it as a .sav, cause it doesn't contain a savegame, but a lot of compressed files. Of course I'm talking all the time about the pogoshell Sram. - How can I make one? Well, just backup all your Sram (256k) with your favorite flashing tool in one single file. You should save it preferably as .dump, but any extension should work. - What the hell are Crc mode and Gamecode mode? which one should I use? Depending on pogoshell version, the rom and the savefile are linked together by different methods. For pogoshell 1.2 you should use Crc mode, and for pogoshell 1.3, you should use the gamecode mode. - Is there any way to extract everything from the dump in one go? Yes, you can use the new Extract All command. - Why .dump and not .sav? I chose to make Sram Explorer's default file extension .dump 'cause like I said before I didn't consider Sram dump to be a regular savefile. Most of the emulators (not only gba) use .sav as their file extension for savegame, so do most of the flashing utilities. (Just guessing; I use only f2a). So most people have a lot of .sav's on their hard drive that Sram explorer can't open (they are not Sram dumps). Since I didn't want to link Sram Explorer with files it couldn't open, I chose another extension. Another reason is that I wanted to make a distinction between the file I extract from, and the file I extract. - Does it work with pogobridge? I never tried, but newbie tried it and he seems to be able to extract save from it without any problem. Be careful not to press the save button; that might destroy your dump. - Is there a way to rename a save in SramExplorer? Yes, you can rename your file by just clicking on them like in explorer. - What is this .state file in my dump? It's the file that pogoshell uses to store its settings, you shouldn't touch it (you shouldn't touch any system files in general) - What is this last_exec file in my dump? It's the file that pogoshell uses to know which game has been played last, don't erase it!! If you do and then rewrite your dump to the card, you'll lose your last savegame. - I didn't have this last_exec file, but I promise I didn't erase it ;) is that bad? This file appears only if you just turned off your gba after playing a game. If you turn on your gba and didn't play a game, pogoshell will just compress the bank and then erase last_exec. A new last_exec will be created next time you'll launch a game. - I extract my savegame with extract_save.exe and with Sram Explorer and I get two different files, what's wrong? Pogoshell and extract_save don't use the same piece of code to decompress savegame. I guess sasq evolved the pogoshell decompression function, but didn't feedback any change to extract_save. So if you compare the file extracted by pogoshell (in bank 0 after playing a game) and extract_save, sometimes you get a very slight difference (1 or 2 bytes). That should explain why some people can't extract some saves with extract_save but can with pogoshell. Sram Explorer uses the latest source code available from cvs the 15 june 2003. So it should extract the same file as pogoshell, not as extract_save. - I open my dump and save it without doing any modification, now the file is different, is it normal? Yes, Sram Explorer reconstructs an Sram dump from scratch each time you save. It's something like if you did a defrag on the dump, the file might had moved inside the dump, but everything is still here. - What is this SramExp.exe file? when I click on it, nothing happen. It's a command line version of SramExplorer. If you click on it from the explorer, nothing will happen, you need to execute it from a command prompt to do something. - What is that API directory, can I erase it? Yes you can erase it, it's for people that want to use SramReader.dll in there own application. - My savegame are not sorted anymore, why? Since version 1.2, when you open a dump, your savegame appear in the same order they are physically store in pogoshell, but you can know sort them by clicking on the column of your choice. - I save my dump and now the file is 0ko Sorry, that was a bug in the version 1.01, please upgrade for the latest version - I find a bug or have another question, what should I do? Post a message on the board of www.gbaemu.com, I try to read those boards regularly. And if I don't answer you, somebody else will. [1.x only] - Why has my empty bank only 65 478 bytes free? (intead of 65 536) Pogoshell needs some extra space to manage its own file system in Sram. - Some of my banks that should contain savegames are empty with Sram Explorer, what's wrong? That happened to me a few times while testing. It seems that sometimes there is a transfer error when you backup your Sram. Try again a few more times and that should work (I got the problem with the parallel f2a linker). When you open a dump, a message in the status bar tells you how many banks it was able to load. If it's less than the number of banks you use, then you've got a bad file.