gc-forever - Gamecube/Wii Forums

I have been looking online for some memory cards for my GC. I have heard that some of these cards will corrupt? I want to get the largest but safest card. What would you recommend?

I've always used cheap 128 Mb memory cards without any problem (this one: http://www.ebay.it/itm/128MB-128-MB-MEM ... 1332642830)

get a 512 block card (advertised as "4MB").

Just letting everyone know that there's a difference between MB (megabytes) and Mb (megabits), so pay attention to capitalization. 1 byte is 8 bits, so a 4MB card will hold 8 times as much data as a 4Mb card.

Nintendo's 251 block card is great.

For uncertain reasons (many people suspect heat), 1019 cards are often reported as corrupting on North American region Wii consoles.
I'm not aware of the specific issue affecting either 2043 cards, or PAL and Japan systems.

I think there are two distinct problems that make people often think their cards are corrupt when they're not:
- the cases on some generic cards are too big to fit smoothly in the wii's slots, causing poor connectivity.
- libogc (and hence every homebrew app including HBC, preloader/priiloader etc.) has bugs in its memory card code, causing bad data to be stored in the SRAM. So if you run any homebrew app and then at a later time run any GC game without removing/reinserting the card the game may report the card as corrupted. It can easily fixed by taking the card out and putting it back in.
I've used plenty of cheap knock-off cards (ones you can find on ebay for $2) and none have ever suffered from data corruption.

tueidj wrote:I think there are two distinct problems that make people often think their cards are corrupt when they're not:
- the cases on some generic cards are too big to fit smoothly in the wii's slots, causing poor connectivity.
- libogc (and hence every homebrew app including HBC, preloader/priiloader etc.) has bugs in its memory card code, causing bad data to be stored in the SRAM. So if you run any homebrew app and then at a later time run any GC game without removing/reinserting the card the game may report the card as corrupted. It can easily fixed by taking the card out and putting it back in.
I've used plenty of cheap knock-off cards (ones you can find on ebay for $2) and none have ever suffered from data corruption.

Well have you used a 1019 block memory card on a US Wii? If your Wii was PAL from the factory, that might be part of why you haven't seen it.
No idea if sufficiently region changing a system with homebrew (so it becomes faux US) has any effect.

I have used the official 1019 memory card on PAL GC and Wii and it has corrupted my saves. Most notably I had troubles saving Resident Evil 4 but I almost lost all my Baten Kaitos saves as well so I stopped using it altogether

theclaw wrote:Well have you used a 1019 block memory card on a US Wii? If your Wii was PAL from the factory, that might be part of why you haven't seen it.
No idea if sufficiently region changing a system with homebrew (so it becomes faux US) has any effect.

There's no such thing as a "US wii" or "PAL wii", the hardware is identical; only the installed system menu is different and once you start a gamecube game it's no longer running.

tueidj wrote:There's no such thing as a "US wii" or "PAL wii", the hardware is identical; only the installed system menu is different and once you start a gamecube game it's no longer running.

Yeah I know it doesn't make much sense. Logically speaking, the whole thing should be hogwash from the beginning.
Thus all capacities of card corrupting at an equal rate, on both gamecube and wii.

I have a MadCatz 1019 block card. It corrupted once when I was little although I think it was a bad connection and went away. It may have actually corrupted later, I don't remember. Then, its filesystem disappeared for no reason. Not corrupted, just "needed to be formatted."
By this point I knew what I was doing and went through block by block with a text editor, looking for metadata. I did find partial saves from 2004 for Spongebob: Battle for Bikini Bottom, although I don't even think i owned the card at that point.