restoring memcards to dexdrive

[O-Dawg]

I'm sorry if this is a silly question, but i've been searching the faq and this board, and i haven't found an answer yet.

I've been playing ff8 on a real psx. I recently found epsxe, so i used my dexdrive to copy the save to my pc, i made a copy of the .gme file and loaded that into epsxe, and i played the game for an hour or so in the emulator. i didn't use savestates. I saved the game back to the .gme file. I want to stress that at this point, the save works. I can quit the emulator, restart, and reload from this save. However, when i load the .gme in dexplorer, it is blank. the dexdrive doesn't recognize it as a valid save (it loads the gme without an error, but it's blank). I can't get my save back into my real psx.

So my question is, is this supported? is there some sort of one-way translation from .gme to epsxe format, and you can't go back? Am i doing something wrong? has anyone else gotten this to work?

I'm noting this example with ff8, but i've tried it with a couple games and different saves, and it doesn't work for any of them.

Thanks for any info,

O-Dawg

[SimonMallion]

I'm not sure about a solution here, but what I know is that a dexdrive save (.gme) is 3904 bytes larger than a standard memory card (131072 bytes). In this 3904 bytes, comments for dexdrive saves are stored, plus some other information. What I think might be happening is when you save your game in ePSXe, ePSXe only writes back to the last 131072 bytes of the card because that is all ePSXe is concerned with. The first 3904 (containing the comments), may also include a checksum, which does not get updated by ePSXe, therefore your dexdrive software may refuse to load your save because it might think the .gme file is corrupted. I will do some investigation (I dont have a dexdrive unfortunately), and see if there is a way of fixing this in my PSX Memory Card Tool. I hope this was some help

[O-Dawg]

Well, that makes perfect sense. Perhaps if I re-d/l the game via the dexdrive, and don't save a comment, it might work (the thinking is if epsxe doesn't have to update the comment and checksum, they may still match). I'll try that when i get home and see if it works.

Thanks! I'll also take a look at your memory tool, looks very interesting compared to the base functionality provided by epsxe.

[rajatjain35]

you could also try this:

1. reload the save in epsxe, using your .gme.
2. save the game on an epsxe memcard.
3. go to aldostools.com, where you can get a epsxe-dex converter.
4. convert the memcard.
5.and you're done, theoretically.