[Phoenix Man]

Hello. Recently I had a midday at my school where we took out old consoles and played on them. I went along and brought my PlayStation 1, although we were busy the entire day playing the X-Box with Mario Karts.

I came home this day, and thought I'd play my PlayStation. However, I live at home, and my parents won't let me hook it up to the TV. I can't afford a TV, so I decided to just find an emulator and put the Final Fantasy VIII CD in my CD tray.

The game works completely. It's PAL, and I haven't even had to use one of those PPF patch thingmabobs the "Help" menu says I should. I tried using the PPF patch to fix my problem, and even tried to use the sub-whatever function on the CD. Both even made the problem worse; I couldn't play the game at all because I'd get a black screen.

Basically, what I want to do is load my game from my memory card. I don't have any place in my computer I could plug the memory card in, so I figured I'd just download a savefile the nearest which matches my own and go along from that.

I promptly went ahead and downloaded a savefile from GameFAQs, and used Aldo Vargas's "Memory Manager" tool to put the savefile over to my epsxe000.mcr file.

I started up the game, and pressed "Continue". To my suprise, the savefile didn't work; appearantly it wasn't recognised and it thought it was from another Final Fantasy version.

Now, I found out why: the savefile wasn't PAL, and didn't have my serial. I changed the savefile to my serial & set it to PAL, and tried it; it dissappeared from the list.

I promptly downloaded another savefile; which contained a bunch of savefiles. Seeing that .GME files are supported by EPSXE, I went ahead and just put it in. The savefile was empty, appearantly. It also was the American version; so I set it to PAL and my serial code (SLES-02080 (SLESP02080)). It still didn't work. I even went as far as setting it to my 3rd CD code (SLES-22080 (SLESP22080)) which the savefiles were ment for. To no avail.

So I'm asking for help. Why won't the savefiles simply be good little savefiles and load? Is there any fix? Does anyone have savefiles for the PAL version which *will* work? Hopefully I'll find it out in the next episode of "Phoenix's Problems".

Seriously, can someone find me PAL savefiles or something that makes this work? I was somewhere in CD 3, right before the Ragarok event in my floating Balamb Garden.

Hello to the community,
- Phoenix Man

 

[hushypushy]

Why won't the savefiles simply be good little savefiles and load?

not sure. NTSC to PAL and vice versa is, for some reason, tricky.

an alternative solution is to buy a Dex Drive and transfer your original PSX game save files to your computer.

 

[dbhankins]

There are more differences between the save files than just the serial number and region code. IIRC, there are some differences in the internal save file layout. There's a program out there that can convert some saves between regions called PSXMemtool. It is supposed to work with FF8.

The following link is to a thread that may have some useful info:

http://www.ngemu.com/forums/showthread.php?t=65985


Dan

 

[Phoenix Man]

That didn't work. The PSXMemTool file won't run at all. First it couldn't find "pbvm60.dll", and after I installed it it simply crashes.

.....does anyone have an FF8 savefile for PAL which is at disk 3 (with floating Balamb)?

 

[hushypushy]

get it from here and you wont have trouble with that dll: http://simonmallion.homedns.org/PSXMemTool/index.php (its slow because its off his home machine, so be patient).

and anyway, assuming that nothing works at all, you will be extremely lucky if you can find anyone that has a save anywhere near where you want it (i dont know if i really have to explain why).

 

[Phoenix Man]

Alright, that did it. Thanks!