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How to retain game settings on CPS3

yavuzg

yavuzg

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OK may be a dumb question and either already written somewhere or too trivial that nobody bothered to mention it :)

I converted a cart with Darksoft's SuperBIOS and didn't touch the custom SH2. All is fine and playing Third Strike for a while on my cab (infact never re-written any other game).

Anyway, my question is simple; While in the game I press the test button and get access to the setup screens. I setup to "free play" and choose "Save & Exit". The game plays as free play but when I power down the cab and power it up next day, free play setting is lost...

Is there a way (that I don't know) to retain this setting?

I'm not re-writing the game. Game is still the same and the region is still the same...
 
the settings are stored in the cart in the FM1208 RAM.
put a battery on the board, change the settings, power off/on and see what happens....
 

although I'm not really sure it's relevant now.
almost all of it is not important with a dead cart. just solder a new battery in.
skip to 23:30 for the actual part you need to watch.
even then you don't need to have it plugged in and working.
really, if you cant handle soldering in a new battery then you need to look for an easier project and/or don't mess with the settings and accept the defaults.
 
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Mr T Guru said:
the settings are stored in the cart in the FM1208 RAM.
put a battery on the board, change the settings, power off/on and see what happens....
Click to expand...
Although the batteries coming out of these carts are 3V, I've put a 3.6V battery (which I use in CPS2).

And, as you said, the free-play setting retained. Interestingly the FM1208 RAM is supposed to be a NVRAM which do not supposed to need a battery to retain content... But, hey, it works anyway...

Thanks Mr T Guru ;)
 
I don't know where you got your info. NVRAM requires some form of power to keep it alive.
NV means 'non-volatile'
in computer terms that means 'retaining data even if there is a break in the power supply'
that retaining is done with a battery.
if Capcom were smarter they would have just used the 93C46 EEPROM on the motherboard. No idea why it was not used. They even covered it up with a plastic cover like it's some secret device! It's just a common EEPROM with 0x80 storage capacity which can be read on any common EPROM programmer. Even so it contains nothing so was unused. I guess when you get as big as Capcom you can put components on the board that aren't even used and cover them up with plastic boxes just to show you are the king of part wasters.

There are other commercial NVRAMs like M48T58Y used mostly on Konami games.
Inside there is a memory+clock chip and 2 batteries wired in parallel to double the storage life of the device.
 
Mr T Guru said:
I don't know where you got your info. NVRAM requires some form of power to keep it alive.
Click to expand...
The specsheet says this is a "ferroelectric" RAM which is supposed to keep the data content for 10 years without power.

Anyway, apparently that was not the case :) May be its "capability" to retain content without power was lost due to age...

I agree Capcom has chosen a weird media to keep game info...
 
Forgive me for chiming in on something I don't fully understand. Are you saying that if I want settings to hold across power cycles on the SuperBIOS cart, I can add a battery to do this?
 
guano said:
Forgive me for chiming in on something I don't fully understand. Are you saying that if I want settings to hold across power cycles on the SuperBIOS cart, I can add a battery to do this?
Click to expand...
Well, although I don't want to generalize it but yes, at least, in my case, when I put a fresh battery in the cart as Mr T Guru suggested, I was able to save my game settings across power cycles...
 
Is installing a battery in a superbios cart necessary to save settings, or was this only a quirk with your particular setup?
 
CPS3 stores it's settings on serial non volatile memory (microwire EEPROM).

When you boot a different game, the game detects that the existing data doesn't belong to it. Then it formats the EEPROM and write it's own default settings.

EEPROM will be deleted EVERY TIME YOU CHANGE THE GAME and nothing can be done about it. The game settings EEPROM is part of the game board, not the security cart. So having a battery on the cart does not affect saving. The FERAM chip on some of the carts (early carts) never seen any use and eventually Capcom stopped adding it to the carts.

Sorry about that. :\
 
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