Gamecube Memory Cards

[Renny]

There are a few games that misbehave with the 1019 card. All games were supposed to be able to save to a card even bigger than 8MB, I believe. Guess Nintendo didn't test for that.

http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/memorycard1019.jsp

[Mayhem]

True, but I hardly expect people here to have any of those games

The only other aspect to consider is that regardless of size, the memory cards can only store 128 files. Great for large EA sports crap, not so good for small saves over a lot of games. Could end up running out of files rather than size.

[kernow]

thats an interesting limitation, as I have more small saves than huge fat ones.

its hardly ever likely to happen though

[Mayhem]

Dunno... it might do in my case if I had saves for all my US games on a 1019 (I own over 130 US Cube games!).

I actually have four of the games that don't work with it in my collection too...

[importaku]

I have used the official 1019 card for ages now with no ill effects.

However i have a usb memory card that i use to copy everything off the card safely & back it up to my pc so if my official card ever loses all my saves i can copy them back.

Sadly theres a few copy protected saves that i can save like phantasy star online. So those are at risk but i have tricked a few saves into copying onto other cards so i can back it up

[Jaxon]

thats an interesting limitation, as I have more small saves than huge fat ones.

its hardly ever likely to happen though

If you add 5 to each size of card(59, 251, 1019), you end up with a number divisible by 16. Those extra five blocks are actually present on the card but are reserved by the system to store format information and are thus unusable for saves. One block is used for the header, one block is used for the directory, another block for the directory backup, the block after that is for the block allocation map, and the final block is for its backup.

Each directory entry uses 64 bytes for storing the game and maker information, date of the last save, memory addresses of the picture animations and banners you see on the memory card utility screen, file copy permissions(this is why you can't copy your PSO save!), and stuff like that. The card can hold up to 127 of these directory entries in this block which amounts to 8128 out of 8192 bytes used. The final few bytes are used for checksum information. So that's where the 127 file limit comes from.

Actually it's not that hard to surpass that number of files if you have a case where you can make multiple save files per game, like saving a lot of Super Monkey Ball replays or Animal Crossing screenshots.