Help with GB Heracles no Eikou

[ze10]

I've been playing Herakles no Eikou on my Gameboy everdrive and I ran into a weird problem. I got killed in the first tower of the game and got sent back to the first town. I saved my game and turned it off. However, when I got back to it, I couldn't open the door leading to the tower I died on, because I didn't have the key that opens that door. It was then that I realized my 2 key items were gone, both the key and something else I got from the tower. I have no idea how to proceed now. Has anyone run into that problem? Any ideas that could help me?

[Pennywise]

Sorry pal, you're SOL on that one.

Apparently you lose your key items on a hard save. I know it sucks, but a fix is not currently in the works. I'll get to it eventually, unless anyone wants to fix it for me.

[ze10]

Oh that's nasty D:  Is that a bug in the translation or was that in the original game?
Am I supposed to use save states instead of using the game save system?

I wanna give this game another shot, I just want to know how to not lose my progress again

[FAST6191]

Inventory cheats are not that hard to make.
If you wanted to transfer the save to a PC, and possibly grab another.

Depending upon the game key items might be in a different area of memory entirely to potions or more basic consumables (which can then be trivially found with cheats -- standard use a potion, check, use a potion, check, don't use one but let it run for a bit and check for what did not change, use a potion, check...) which means you might have a harder time -- searches narrow far easier when you can repeat a process quickly, however pinging around between before and after savestates and doing the relevant checks will usually still get you there.

If saves do lose things/won't restore inventory (somewhat odd for a game like this but if it is a 80s/90s game then far from unheard of) then might just be worth doing the tower on the PC emulator and then starting back when the game allows you to save properly and maintain a working game.

[KingMike]

Sorry pal, you're SOL on that one.

Apparently you lose your key items on a hard save. I know it sucks, but a fix is not currently in the works. I'll get to it eventually, unless anyone wants to fix it for me.

Are you for certain on that, and not just shitty emulation?
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the game is a MBC2, like most of the early GB games with save function.
And despite that MBC2 is a really common mapper (ALMOST all of the monochrome library seems to be either mapperless, MBC1 (mostly two PCB variants: with and without RAM+battery support) or MBC2 which has internal RAM and external battery), VBA especially does a shitty job emulating it. It at least apparently does not emulate RAM locking, which causes Aretha to vomit upon saving, but apparently Final Fantasy Adventure can't save without at least corrupting the second save slot.
Another MBC2 quirk that VBA doesn't emulate is that the mapper function apparently only works correctly with addresses with bit 8 set (that is, odd hundreds value, like $2100).
bgb seemed to be a more reliable emulator (at least with the accuracy settings turned on).

[Pennywise]

Someone else reported this issue to me a while back. I can only assume that I moved data around in WRAM and that it broke key items in hard saves. Unless the Everdrive emulation is faulty, it's a translation bug.