Emulator

Is a memory card in Slot A in the Config > GameCube settings?

if there wasn't i wouldn't have reported it :P

I suspect something is wrong with your MemoryCardA.USA.raw file
location is c:\users<yourname>\My Documents\Dolphin Emulator\GC
can you open it with the MemoryCard Manager?

does the game report the same error after moving the memory card file to another location? (this will create a new memorycard

yep tried that already
the problem still happens after i move the memory card to another location

and the results of opening it in the memorycard manager are?

also try renaming/moving the entire 'Dolphin Emulator' folder so all configurations are reset to default and try again

opening the card in memorycard manager
there is no problems
and i uninstalled dolphin and installed it to a different directory and still the same problem with the game

sorry but I don't mean dolphin itself, but the configuration folder,
as of 4.0+ it is in my documents/dolphin emulator
for more info see https://dolphin-emu.org/docs/guides/controlling-global-user-directory/

i moved everything out of my documents /dolphin and still the same problem
then i uninstalled dolphin after that and reinstalled it

i have just tried it on another computer and still the same problem

this is typically the type of error that will affect every GC game (of the same region)
do other games work with the memory card?

unfortunately, I am out of ideas for now, if this is only occurring on this one game, maybe check the md5 of the game against the listed one on http://www.gametdb.com/Wii/GWTEA4

all of my other games work with the memory card
i will find my disc and redump it

just redumped it and
crc 2869aa07
md5 b52269da25e94e6f74bff7d49093852e
sha1 a1485e794bd5f995805d91c133f33307eb76a8c4
mine are all the same and still the memory card problem

This game actually has a bug, it can only recognize 59 or 251 block memory cards.
More info: http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/memorycard1019.jsp

thanks tueidj, I had forgot about that page :)

Does that mean this should be accepted?

Afaik there is no way to set per-game memorycards. We could set the default memorycard to be created as a 251block card, but that seems overkill for 6 specific games.

not sure how to deal with this in a reasonable way

It's not an emulation bug so I think it should be rejected. Just make a note on the game's wiki/compatibility entry that only smaller cards will work.

(At least until the memcard_directory stuff is merged, since it should be able to determine the size of the emulated memory card at runtime, right?)