The game is FFTA2 (Final Fantasy Tactics A2)
This is my first time using DraStic, and at first I was pleasantly surprised with how nice the app looked and felt, but that was before months of figuring my way around the program's bugs and general weirdness.
The biggest thing for me though is the cheats. firstly, absolutely love that the cheats are all automatically put in when I started the game, brilliant.
but I've had so much trouble with them. Cheats that I know... I 100% KNOW work and have worked countless times on countless versions of the ROM downloaded from different sites and played on different emulators over time, don't work here in DraStic. and it's infuriating. The cheats either don't work, break in some horrific way, or by some miracle... actually work to an extent.
But I digress. The problem here is that after somehow managing to dodge around game breaking glitches from cheats and getting lucky, I've finally had a more tenacious problem.
I decided to try a couple of cheats, one I'd not used before "Best status conditions" under the all characters tab, which forces all characters on your side to have a bunch of buffs, and I had also used max move, (which enables full map movement of units). I swear I've used the full movement one before and lived, but this time it will not turn off.
The good buffs code worked but only problem is... it doesn't turn off... and I would so live with it (cus oh noooo my characters have a bunch of awesome buffs, what EVER will I do.) but it became... dangerous. one battle I used an attack (summoning a scion) and it failed the battle. but I just assumed it had instant killed the monster I was only supposed to weaken. But then a couple battles later, an allied party moved first and (with the full map movement glitch) ran right up to an enemy. he struck it, and a bunch of random buffs and statuses flashed over the enemy's head. I can't list them all, but I know both "cover" and "covered" were in there, which makes no sense. the mission failed immediately after the animation was complete.
The only way I got that code's effects to stop was using another code "always normal status", but for all I know it will either reverse upon me turning that off, or that one will stay permanent too. I was about to go find a battle and test it, but this is when it gets bad, game over time.
Now, whenever I move anywhere in the world map, I am unable to move my cursor, unable to bring up any menus, or do anything. the game's animations and music are working but nothing else, and the emulator is also responding fine.
The only backdated save I have is when I was testing out an all items in the store code but i also couldn't remove those items from being stocked and wanted to unlock them fairly, so I didn't want to use that save, but I might have to.
I was also kinda hoping that if I were to perhaps use the backup ROM file of the game I have unused in the games folder on my phone, but make a copy of the save file and rename it to match the clean ROM, loading the in-game save that way but on a fresh ROM file, then maybe it'd work? but I don't know how DraStic manages its cheat configurations; whether they're linked to the ROM itself, matches the name of the ROM, or on the save file.
Any advice towards this would be much appreciated. I've put dozens of hours into the game over the space of several months playing in the evenings before bed, and on the bus. It feels like a massive waste of part of my life to have to redo it all.
if I did.... I'd honestly probably just use another emulator for this game. because again, why the heck were cheats I 100% guarantee have worked for me a hundred times, not working here or being extremely buggy? it was just a huge let down.
If no solution is found I definitely won't ask for a refund or anything like that, you can keep the support. but just would be a little disappointed.
Thank you in advance for your time.
p.s. Before anyone suggests it, I know all about having to completely close and restart and load in game save, not savestate or autosave, in order to completely remove cheats. Figured it out on my own. So I tried that a bunch of times and also tried reactivating, and disabling cheats once again but to no avail.
Problem with savegame corruption and cheats
Re: Problem with savegame corruption and cheats
You are kinda mistaken on something..... the cheat effects are not saved on the rom at all. Changing the rom will not really do anything (assuming it is a good clean copy, which it may or may not be). Cheat codes on an emulator (or Physical DS) effect the values stored in ram. They do not touch the read only memory of the cartridge (eventhough on an emulator this could be acomplished) it is just not how it is done. As far as being able to turn off the codes you can use the main menu before you load any game to go into the options and the general tab and disable cheats there then load the game and set them to off.
You could also go into the drastic folder on your phone then to the config folder and remove the one pertaining final fantasy tactics (I think that also stores what cheats you have turned on ...... but I could be wrong and exo or lordus will have to correct)
Finally the cheats that do not work coukd be for a few reasons
1. The cheat in the database is wrong (Did you try manually inputing the code in the custom cheats menu from a source you know the code is correct at?)
2. Drastic uses a lot of tricks and hacks to get DS games to run at the lecel they do on as many devices as it does. Cheats may interact with how the emulator interprets code differently then on a physical DS or on a different emulator and sometimes codes have to change work on different emulators....
3. Heck some cheat codes even have to change or do not work across different versions of the exact same cheat device (hence the gameshark v1 v2 v3 you sometimes see on cheat code sites)
You could also go into the drastic folder on your phone then to the config folder and remove the one pertaining final fantasy tactics (I think that also stores what cheats you have turned on ...... but I could be wrong and exo or lordus will have to correct)
Finally the cheats that do not work coukd be for a few reasons
1. The cheat in the database is wrong (Did you try manually inputing the code in the custom cheats menu from a source you know the code is correct at?)
2. Drastic uses a lot of tricks and hacks to get DS games to run at the lecel they do on as many devices as it does. Cheats may interact with how the emulator interprets code differently then on a physical DS or on a different emulator and sometimes codes have to change work on different emulators....
3. Heck some cheat codes even have to change or do not work across different versions of the exact same cheat device (hence the gameshark v1 v2 v3 you sometimes see on cheat code sites)
Re: Problem with savegame corruption and cheats
Thanks TkSilver for the detailed response.
My apologies, I didn't specify that I'd also tried disabling cheats in the menu after seeing it on another page, and yes I did try adding codes from other sites manually. For example the "equip any item with any class" code from the misc cheats tab of the game didn't work but when I added the code again from another place it was working fine.
Some other things though, like the "hold L when choosing directions to move again" which I used to abuse like the devil wouldn't work mo matter which version of the code or the game I used.
Just out of curiosity, how would the emulator handle of you took another region of the game (like say a European release) and replaced the American release by changing the name with the one of the game you're playing?
Cus I did this as a test and it is what made the equip any item code work. (since of course different regions of games tend to have different action replay codes.)
I wasn't aware how much complication goes in to running the emulator. Well, I still don't, but I suppose I assumed there was a base way for emulators to work and then minor differences between each one in more specific details.
I'm now wondering though if I'll be able to find codes specifically converted for DraStic.
Do you think you could let me know where exactly I need to go in the folders? I went into DraStic > Config but only see a few files but none of them have the name if the game, so I don't know which one pertains to it. I mean it's the only game I've played but I don't know if there are other Config files in there
My apologies, I didn't specify that I'd also tried disabling cheats in the menu after seeing it on another page, and yes I did try adding codes from other sites manually. For example the "equip any item with any class" code from the misc cheats tab of the game didn't work but when I added the code again from another place it was working fine.
Some other things though, like the "hold L when choosing directions to move again" which I used to abuse like the devil wouldn't work mo matter which version of the code or the game I used.
Just out of curiosity, how would the emulator handle of you took another region of the game (like say a European release) and replaced the American release by changing the name with the one of the game you're playing?
Cus I did this as a test and it is what made the equip any item code work. (since of course different regions of games tend to have different action replay codes.)
I wasn't aware how much complication goes in to running the emulator. Well, I still don't, but I suppose I assumed there was a base way for emulators to work and then minor differences between each one in more specific details.
I'm now wondering though if I'll be able to find codes specifically converted for DraStic.
Do you think you could let me know where exactly I need to go in the folders? I went into DraStic > Config but only see a few files but none of them have the name if the game, so I don't know which one pertains to it. I mean it's the only game I've played but I don't know if there are other Config files in there
Re: Problem with savegame corruption and cheats
If you didn't see a file with the same title as the rom you were using then don't worry about it, there is probably nothing saved there.
Using annother region's rom to load a save file..... might work. It will probably mainly come down to whether or not the game checks the save's region (usually games that save on their own cartridge do not check since I is massively harder to load a different region save into a physical cartridge) and whether or not the save itself is the same across regions.
The save could be different if the rom saves something like a multi language choice and it happens to be in the same place in the save as the main character's name so going from multi europe would change the main character 's name to Spanish and the other way around woukd try and set the language to Hawk. To be fair this is a silly example and woukd not work exactly like this but these differences can throw up issues cause saves to only sometimes work across regions.... not to mention for some games the regions are coded by 2 completely different companies.
Using annother region's rom to load a save file..... might work. It will probably mainly come down to whether or not the game checks the save's region (usually games that save on their own cartridge do not check since I is massively harder to load a different region save into a physical cartridge) and whether or not the save itself is the same across regions.
The save could be different if the rom saves something like a multi language choice and it happens to be in the same place in the save as the main character's name so going from multi europe would change the main character 's name to Spanish and the other way around woukd try and set the language to Hawk. To be fair this is a silly example and woukd not work exactly like this but these differences can throw up issues cause saves to only sometimes work across regions.... not to mention for some games the regions are coded by 2 completely different companies.
Re: Problem with savegame corruption and cheats
So far I hadn't had a single problem with this though. I've only had problems with the cheats which as I said happened before I did this switch. in fact if anything like I said it made a couple of things actually work that didn't previously.
It's just this one glitch now where it won't let me move.
It's just this one glitch now where it won't let me move.