I downloaded Pokemon Lazarus last week and instantly fell in love, and wanted to play it on real hardware. I bought an EZ Flash Omega Definitive Edition, updated the flashcart with the latest firmware on the site, added the ROM to the cart, and tried playing on both a GBA and a DS.
While the game runs mostly nicely (I've encountered some freezes here and there), I can't actually get the save functionality to work. I started my initial save playing on a Steamdeck and transferred over the game and save file. I had to rename the save file from an .srm to .sav but reading online this seems to work fine for other games.
When I go to save in the game, it shows the save worked successfully. I ended up playing for about 30 minutes saving many times along the way, and yet when I turned off the DS and turned it back on later, my progress was back to the very first save I imported over.
I tried installing the game in NORFLASH, as well as setting the save mode to 128bit in the EZ Flash software, but neither seem to work.
Has anyone else encountered this before and found a solution to saving on real hardware?
EDIT: Just adding that I tried using https://savefileconverter.com/#/srm-sav to convert my srm to a .sav and while it seemed successful, I still can't get saves to work.