How to use stop n swop on xenia

Intro:

If you find yourself in a situation where you played through Banjo Kazooie on Xenia and collected the eggs and ice key but then found out that they did not transfer to Tooie for some odd reason, this guide is for you. The answer is that in order to have cross save support in games on Xenia, the saves need to be in a STFS package. Xenia doesn't write saves in STFS packages, but instead as extracted files from the package.


Solution:

To solve this issue, you need to use a fork of Xenia that supports STFS package saves which you can find here:

https://github.com/epozzobon/xenia/releases/

I'd advise that if you plan on playing Banjo Kazooie and Banjo Tooie on Xenia, use this fork specifically so that you can be able to transfer the stop n swop items between games. The performance between the latest Xenia Canary and this Xenia fork are similar when it comes to the Banjo games anyways.

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Situation 2 - Already started making save progress in both games on regular Xenia and not the xenia fork:

For this situation, you'll have to create save files in the Xenia fork (which should be .bin files that aren't folders). Then get a tool called "Velocity" which you can find here:

https://community.wemod.com/t/release-velocity-xbox360-cross-platform-file-manager-v0-1-0-0/2623

The saves from the xenia fork are considered STFS packages which Velocity can open. Go to Open > Packages and browse for your .bin save file (not the folder named .bin). Once opened, you'll see a .dat file. Right click on it and choose "Replace file" and then browse to the save file that you made with regular Xenia which should be a .dat file. Now finally, click on "rehash/resign" and your .bin file should now be ready to go with your previous save progress from regular xenia. Repeat this for both Banjo games and you'll now be able to share the stop n swop items between both games that you already had progress in. Any stop n swop items you get in Kazooie will automatically appear in Tooie.

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After Thoughts:

The reason I wrote this guide was because there weren't any information on this anywhere on Google, nor any guides. I had to find this out by asking in the Xenia discord server and they helped me out.  The Banjo games on Xenia are awesome, runs great even on my budget 2021 laptop.

It's totally worth playing the Xbox versions of the Banjo games just for the native widescreen updated textures, and stable framerate in Tooie. I understand that notes you collect in Banjo Kazooie are now permanent. But if you know the game well, you wouldn't die anyways so it would be the same as playing through the N64 version. The only time dying is more likely is in the last two worlds. So with that said, I definitely recommend playing the xbox version of the games, just ignore the Nuts & Bolts references.

As for Tooie, the one drawback about the xbox version is the consistent 30 fps which in turn makes the Canary Mary race even harder to beat in the last world. So my advice for that is to not go for 100% in this game. Even the youtuber "The Completionist" doesn't recommend completing Tooie. So instead just go for sort of a 98% and skip the Canary Mary race altogether, it's never worth doing. Another issue to bring up about Tooie is that there will be audio crackling in a few places in the game due to Xenia's lack of proper audio emulation. This is pretty minor and won't matter to those who played the game many times through. It was still worth playing the Xbox version of Tooie for the updated visuals and stable Framerate.

My last tip would be to open Xenia's config file and change some settings. Such as:  gpu = d3d12 , and finally I recommend changing the option related to variable refresh rate to false because it causes screen tearing even with Vsync enabled. NOTE: Use ctrl F to find those options. Also, make a portable.txt file next to xenia's exe file so that the config and save data will be created in the same folder instead of in documents/xenia.