About
RAC is a homebrew tool to back up an Animal Crossing: Wild World (ACWW) town (or the save data of any other DS Game Card with a 2 Mbit save chip) to a SLOT-2 storage device for Nintendo DS. It is capable of displaying the town name and names of residents in ACWW saves, and it names each backup after the town name and current date. It can also restore saved data from a SLOT-2 device to such a Game Card.
It does have some limitations:
- RAC does not back up the game itself, only your town. (This limitation is by design to discourage copyright infringement.)
- RAC cannot back up save sizes other than 2 Mbit (256 KiB).
- RAC can back up and restore save data of other games with 2 Mbit save, such as Oideyo Doubutsu no Mori (おいでよ どうぶつの森, the Japanese version of ACWW) or Mario Kart DS. But RAC cannot display info from these games, and except for Drawn to Life (U) and March of the Minis (U), it uses the town name "Non-ACWW save" when saving backups.
- RAC cannot backup to SLOT-1 storage devices due to limitations in the ability of the devices to support card swapping. It does work on GBA Movie Player CF and SuperCard SD. If you have a SLOT-1 card and a wireless router connecting your DS to your PC, you can use savsender to back up (but not restore) save data.
- RAC cannot back up to SLOT-2 devices that contain only NOR flash and battery-backed SRAM. These cards, sold during the Game Boy Advance era (2001 through 2004), include Flash2Advance, EZ-Flash, and EFA-Linker (Extreme Flash Advance). For these cards, I recommend using Animala, which saves the town in a compressed format that AnimalMap can decompress.
- RAC should be run on a Nintendo DS, not on a PC under emulation. Emulators vary in how well they support 2D graphics palettes, ARM7 peripherals (touch, sound), Game Card save, and especially SLOT-2 devices.
- Use RAC at your own risk. If you have a SLOT-2 device that can also use another backup tool such as REIN r17, use it in parallel with RAC for a few weeks and compare the backups using md5sum before relying on RAC. I also encourage you to back up the SLOT-2 device itself to a PC regularly.
Download
The file RAC.zip (last updated 2008-01-01) contains source code and a .nds executable.
Installing
RAC is DS homebrew. To learn how to use DS homebrew, read dev-scene.com's Homebrew FAQ and Flashcart Homebrew Transfer Guide.
Unless you use a GBA Movie Player v2 (CompactFlash version), you will have to patch RAC with a DLDI tool before using it to back up. DLDI drivers allow the DS to read and write files on your SLOT-2 device. They are provided by the card's manufacturer or by members of the DS homebrew community. (Some drivers allow only reading files, not writing them. If you use a read-only driver, you will not be able to save a backup to your SLOT-2 device.) See the official DLDI page and dev-scene.com's DLDI page for more information.
After you start the patched rac.nds from your SLOT-2 devices menu, if you are using an Action Replay DS or other NoPass card, remove the NoPass card and insert the Game Card. Mr. Resetti will let you know if the driver doesn't work when you run the patched rac.nds or if there is another problem.
Technical details
I made my own custom framebuffer library for RAC. I might have used DragonMinded's LibFB, but it lacks features that I will need for future parts of project DX:
- LibFB does not support Game Boy Advance, only Nintendo DS.
- LibFB does not support DS VRAM bank H (sub screen background in 3D mode), only the 128 KiB banks.
- LibFB does not support 16-color mode, only high-color mode.
- LibFB does not support word wrap refinement, only the greedy wrapping algorithm.
Legal
The program and its manual are distributed under the same license as zlib and libpng:Copyright 2007 Damian Yerrick <pinoandchester@pineight.com>
This work is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied warranty. In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages arising from the use of this work.
Permission is granted to anyone to use this work for any purpose, including commercial applications, and to alter it and redistribute it freely, subject to the following restrictions:
- The origin of this work must not be misrepresented; you must not claim that you wrote the original work. If you use this work in a product, an acknowledgment in the product documentation would be appreciated but is not required.
- Altered source versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be misrepresented as being the original work.
- This notice may not be removed or altered from any source distribution.
"Source" is the preferred form of a work for making changes to it.
DS Game Card save I/O uses cardme by SaTa. SLOT-2 device I/O uses libfat by Chishm. ACWW town format information by AiboPet.
RAC is not sponsored or endorsed by these companies: Nintendo, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, Animal Crossing, and Mario Kart are trademarks of Nintendo. Action Replay is a trademark of Datel.