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PostPosted: August 1st, 2015, 6:41 am 
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Joined: July 28th, 2009, 1:57 am
Posts: 82
Location: Cumming, GA
kobushi wrote:
Also, you need a lot of RAM, enough to hold an entire floppy disk in memory. Plus, since everything is held in RAM, you have to manually save any changes back to the hard disk, or the data will be wiped.


I realize that this is a bit of an old thread, but something you mentioned here Kobushi has peaked my interested considerably since I've been trying to see if there is a way to get a Save Game from AIZA (running under ERCACHE) to be permanently stored on the HDD to be used the next time I want to load up and play the game. Something like this would be incredibly useful for me, especially when testing. I still haven't saved up to get two HxC slims yet, but I really would like to get two of them and not have to worry about writing to floppies, but I think since I have enough RAM to load AIZA and play it well enough so far, it would be wonderful to find a method of saving a game and loading it virtually using ERCACHE.

I've read the page here: http://page.freett.com/9821xafan/go_ercach.html

And the generous translation of it by Eidis and I feel like I made some progress with the part that talks about saving:

Quote:
However, due to ERCACHE storing data in RAM, the data will be lost when you reset or restart HSB.

Press CTRL + GRAPH + INS keys when you want to save.

Use the following command to load saved game:
A>A:\REBOOT\ERCVFD.EXE /VFDSAVE?


Here is my process in screenshots:

Inside of BM

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(Sorry for the really crappy picture quality here, my iPhone does not take quality nightshots of a CRT monitor...)

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Erchache runs, reads and loads the VFD disks into RAM...

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AIZA starts...

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The Save Game in the First Slot is in the DISK file already. I attempt to save in Slot 2 using the F5 key. This save will work as long as the game is still being played in RAM.

Using the Keyboard Command to SAVE GAME, I press CTRL + GRAPH + INS, and my machine resets, askind me which HDD partition I wish to boot from, (Since I have two in the same machine, a DOS 3.3 image and a DOS 6.2 image thanks to Kobushi's YAHDI images) choosing DOS 6.2, and I get an all new error message in red that I've not seen before:

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This then launched BM, I hit ESC to go to DOS and type:

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Which prompts the message:
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Hitting SPACE will SKIP this and do nothing:

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Hitting RETURN will start to load the AIZA VFDs again it seems...

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...and end on a message that I can't quite read / understand in Japanese.

From there, I'm not entirely sure what to do, but I was hoping there would be a possibility here to save my game and restore it later even after shut down and everything has been cleared from RAM.

In case anyone needs it that doesn't have it already, the instructions for creating the REBOOT folder are on the original Erchache information page, but it essentially states to dump several file sets into a newly created directory called REBOOT, and this archive is that directory.

I've uploaded the AIZA VFD files here in case anyone else would like to try on their setup. Please note though for anyone else reading this, that due to the ERCACHE setup being dependent on how much ram you have in your machine, the following value will be different in the CONFIG.SYS file. Mine is currently set to VFDS=124, (I have about 20 MB of RAM in my Ce2) but the chart for the RAM amount and the needed values is:

4Mb system = 28
6Mb system = 44
8Mb system = 60
9Mb system = 68
10Mb system = 76
11Mb system = 84
12Mb system = 92
13Mb system = 100
14Mb system = 108
16Mb system = 124
24Mb system = 188
32Mb system = 252
48Mb or more = 256

Thanks for reading!

EDIT! I figured out at least one quick and dirty way to do it, but perhaps there are still quicker methods that can be explored. If anyone else would like to know more, I documented my process for how to at least keep and load a permanent save file with the Action RPG, AIZA: New Generation over at the NFGGames Forums.


-Thomas

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