Saving towns in Animal Crossing

March 21, 2005 12:12 PM

I am addicted to the GameCube game, Animal Crossing. I want to make a copy of my town, and send it to my sister, who is also addicted. It won't let me copy the memory card - is there a way to do this?

I know you can send your character to other towns, but I want to send my town to her character. It's almost like I want to do a "save as". Any help would be appreciated.

posted by Futurehouse to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (10 answers total)

Try turning on your Gamecube without a disc in it. There is a utility to copy saved information from one card to another.
posted by FreezBoy at 12:32 PM on March 21, 2005

Alternately, hold down A while the cube is being drawn on the screen right after you power on.
posted by nmiell at 12:47 PM on March 21, 2005

Does Animal Crossing allow copying? F-Zero GX doesn't allow it thanks to a contest Nintendo sponsored when the game first came out. To verify winning claims players had to mail their memory cards to Nintendo, so if copying the F-Zero data files were allowed multiple people could have claimed to have earned the same rank in the contest.

I found this out when I tried to copy my original memory card 59 to the larger 251. The GameCube absolutely refused to copy the F-Zero data and a little research online revealed the explanation.
posted by Servo5678 at 1:00 PM on March 21, 2005

If you get really stuck and the regular GC utils won't do it, I would bet money that Datel has a solution for you [and that they'll probably end up being sued for it and win as usual]. :-)

After all, console hacking is their bread and butter.
posted by shepd at 1:14 PM on March 21, 2005

Response by poster: I think that Animal Crossing doesn't allow copying...so I guess my sister and I (both adults in our 40's by the way) will just have to send our characters back and forth.

Thanks for your help and suggestions, though!
posted by Futurehouse at 1:42 PM on March 21, 2005

I guess they don't want copying, since it could create problems when you visit other cities and you visit your own city, and maybe someone from your city moves to your city and writes you letters from... whoa. It could create a rift across dimensions man.
posted by ALongDecember at 2:15 PM on March 21, 2005

Is it possible that you could load your game like normal, switch the cards in the GC while it is still running, and then save your game again? I haven't played Animal Crossing, so there could be something obviously wrong with this idea, but nobody else has suggested it. Good luck.
posted by Who_Am_I at 3:18 PM on March 21, 2005

The standard gamecube memory card manager does not allow you to copy towns. And, the game can tell if you switch cards while playing, and you will be thoroughly chastised by one of the residents should you attempt to do so (I tried this when I got the game a few months back.)

All is not lost, though - I am away from my Cube at present and am not able to test this out, but if memory serves, there is a feature in the game that allows you to make a copy of your town. As I remember it, you just boot up your town with card A, insert town-less card B, and then go to the train station and take the train over to card B, which makes a copy.

HOWEVER! There is some complicated stuff involved with going back and forth, and you may or may not lose all of the items you have in your inventory if you are not careful. But they explain this all in the game and it can most likely be avoided if you are paying attention, as I unfortunately was not.

Anyway, I hope this works, and I didn't just make it all up.
posted by Monster_Zero at 4:07 PM on March 21, 2005

Gamefaqs has save files made with a "GameCube USB Memory Adapter", so it is possible with extra hardware.

Lik-sang sells one and google lists some more. Most of them seem rather expensive if you're only going to do this a couple times.
posted by Gary at 1:41 AM on March 22, 2005

On second thought, it may only be possible if you originally played the game with the memory adapter. Getting the save file off of your memory card and onto the memory adapter is the same as your original problem.
posted by Gary at 9:11 AM on March 22, 2005