gc-forever - Gamecube/Wii Forums

I am not sure which part of the forum this topic is supposed to go. Let me know if this is the wrong area.

I am having a lot of problems with the virtual memory cards stored in my SD2SP2, as I regularly get the 'Memory card is damaged' error from games.

Below are some of the troubleshooting steps I had done, all of which failed to fix the problem

Re-format the SD card to FAT32
Delete the RAW files from the SD card and have Swiss generate new cards
Replaced the RAW files with ones created using the Dolphin emulator (this worked for a few days before the error returned)
Boot the game with IPL enabled to format the memory card using the GameCube's memory card manager

Any help is greatly appreciated, as I really don't know what to do at this point.

Below are the details of my GameCube setup, not sure which of these details may be of use.

Japanese DOL-001 console + original Nintendo Wavebird controller
GC Loader flashed with firmware 1.1.2 + 256GB Silicon Power SDXC card formatted with FAT32
SD2SP2 + 2GB Toshiba SD card formatted with FAT32
Insurrection Insurrection Carby flashed with GCVideo 3.0e

The ISOs loaded in the GC Loader are mostly NTSC-U versions, with a small handful of Japanese games, and only three PAL games.

I have tested the following games, and the issue appears to only be isolated to NTSC titles. The PAL titles do not seem to have any problems.

Donkey Konga
Doshin the Giant
Ikaruga
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time & Master Quest
Star Wars Rogue Squadron II
Star Wars Rogue Squadron III
Taxi 3

Thank you.

Can you try and upload a before/after of the .raw files so that we can see the corruption that has occurred?

The RAW files as extracted from the SD card used in SD2SP2 can be downloaded from https://mega.nz/file/5iYzhQBa#JLLt5Yhnf ... LptakS11L4

I don't have a before though, although I can delete the current RAW files and generate new ones and see what happens.

Additional info... Swiss is loaded using the boot.iso from the GCLoader folder in the swiss_r1047 package, and I took swiss_r1047.dol from the DOL folder and renamed it as igr.dol in the root of the SD card.

I did the following steps

1. Created new RAW files with Dolphin
2. Transferred the RAW files to my 2GB low speed card, no go, errors still recur
3. Transferred the RAW files to a 16GB SDHC card, the errors have gone away

I have tested with the following Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (NTSC-U) and Radirgy Generic (NTSC-J), and they are both saving so far.

Could it have been an issue with the 2GB SD card?

The odd thing was the 2GB card has no problems saving my Swiss settings, and could even load an ISO via SP2 from it. Only the memory card feature was problematic

SD cards are full of edge cases, and SDSC cards aren't tested on a regular basis.

It is still very curious though, since even low speed cards shouldn't have issues given that the data bus on the Serial port shouldn't be fast anyway. And as I mentioned, it was able to load ISOs from SD2SP2 without any problems.

This does raise a case about compatibility, is SDHC the minimum requirement for virtual memory cards?

I don't know, SDSC is supposed to be the minimum.

SDSC uses byte addressing and thus goes through a slightly different code path so it's possible there's an issue somewhere since hardly anyone out there is still using SDSC + Virtual Memory Cards.

emu_kidid wrote: ↑

Tue Mar 23, 2021 2:34 am

SDSC uses byte addressing and thus goes through a slightly different code path so it's possible there's an issue somewhere since hardly anyone out there is still using SDSC + Virtual Memory Cards.

Thanks for the explanation - at least I know this is definitely factual since it's coming from you

But I'm responsible for said feature.

Extrems wrote: ↑

Tue Mar 23, 2021 4:44 am

But I'm responsible for said feature.

My bad
Thought it was all by emu_kidid since Swiss is on his Github.

I apologize if I had offended you, it was not intentional.