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Ruahrc
06-07-2007, 02:57 AM
So what's the deal with not being able to save directly to slot B? For example, I have 2 cards, a memory card 251 with all of my saves on it, and a memory card 59 which came with my Animal Crossing game, which has my AC town on it.

Previously, I had the 251 in slot A and the 59 in slot B. When I booted up animal crossing, it would automatically read the town from slot B no problem. But, when I started a 2nd town on my memory card 251, AC will now only let me read the town that is in slot A (or, put differently, if it detects a town on slot A it will default to using that town). So if I want to play the town on the memory card 59, I have to move it to slot A.

OK fine, I thought. I'll just reverse the two, and put the mem card 59 in slot A permanently (except for those few times when I want to play the 2nd town). Well that works great except it would seem that other games don't like to have to save to slot B. Viewtiful Joe, for example will give me a warning about not being able to save my game progress because the card in slot A is full (AC towns take up all 59 blocks of a mem card 59). If I ignore this warning, however, and just start playing the game, I can still save my progress to slot B!

Zelda: TP, however, doesn't like this arrangement. it won't allow me to save games direct to slot B, which means I have to move the mem card 251 back to slot A if I want to save.

To be honest, I am probably going to delete the 2nd town (the one on the mem card 251) because I don't need it anymore. (For those who are not familiar, in order to get the biggest store in Animal Crossing, you have to have a "friend" -a character from another town- visit your town and buy something from the store. This is why I made the 2nd town)

I just don't understand, however, why this limitation is in place? For example, even though games like Viewtiful Joe, which complain about there not being space on slot A upon bootup, still work just fine reading to and saving from cards in slot B. And yet other games won't work properly writing from or reading from slot B (like LoZ:TP). And Animal Crossing could have done with a feature where you could select which town you want to play if it detects towns on both cards- because clearly it has no problem reading from and writing to both slots.

Anyone else have problems like this? Is it a procedural problem on my part or some strange limitation?

Ruahrc

ma
06-08-2007, 07:23 PM
There's no fundamental reason why games can't support slot B better- Timesplitters 2 handles it perfectly. You can load profiles from either or both memory card slots. But it seems that developers are just too lazy to properly support both slots. I've noticed the Twilight Princess issue myself. It's pretty unforgivable for Nintendo themselves to do this.

Ruahrc
06-09-2007, 06:24 AM
I suspected as much- there shouldn't be any difference between the two slots hardware-wise, it's just poor programming.

I erased that 2nd Animal Crossing town (after I coaxed "Bob" to move to my main town) and so now all is well with my memory card slots- with the 251 back in slot A and the AC town in slot B- and no switching back and forth necessary.

OT: Was playing some more Twilight Princess today and I am amazed by the amount of detail in the game. Little touches like frogs jumping around, etc- truly top-notch game art!

Ruahrc

anotherpoorgamer
06-09-2007, 09:45 PM
Here's how I see it, developers where probably thinking the only reason you had to save to slot B is if slot A has been damaged, which seems very unlikely.

Whenever I had a problem with memory cards on the GCN, I just removed one and used slot A.

Nephilim
06-11-2007, 01:43 PM
Only certain games will save to Slot B. I actually have two 1019's, one in slot A and one in slot B. If a game allows slot B, then I save it there.