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| MAME's state saving is getting more stable...? |
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| Shoegazer:
Hey Robin, thanks for the info. You really went out of your way to explain, and it's very much appreciated. What you said made perfect sense. Regarding your checkers analogy - I do hope that there aren't too many piece slamming scenerios in future MAME driver updates! Seriously though, perhaps someday the savestate system itself could be updated for more resilience. I was thinking about some insanely radical ideas that have probably been thought about before (and quickly discounted). Most notably, the use of something akin to a savestate wrapper around drivers that could be invoked whenever the "cancel" operation is detected within a running game, which might alleviate the need for game-specific states to be saved. Could something like this ever be accomplished, or are these the foolish ramblings of a depraved mind? Shoegazer |
| u_rebelscum:
--- Quote from: Shoegazer on August 17, 2007, 11:49:28 pm ---Seriously though, perhaps someday the savestate system itself could be updated for more resilience. I was thinking about some insanely radical ideas that have probably been thought about before (and quickly discounted). Most notably, the use of something akin to a savestate wrapper around drivers that could be invoked whenever the "cancel" operation is detected within a running game, which might alleviate the need for game-specific states to be saved. Could something like this ever be accomplished, or are these the foolish ramblings of a depraved mind? --- End quote --- There is a generic savestate in mame. It doesn't work completely on almost every game; the devil is in the details, and each game has very different details. Thus if the game only has the generic savestate, mame lists savestate as "unsupported", and disables autosavestate (probably so they don't get hammered with "why doesn't my autosave work", which is harder to answer than "why don't I have savestate?"). But you can try to use the numbered savestate. Probably won't work, but others have used it on some games; and if savestate is explicitly added to the game the old ones will most likely not work in the new version. It possibly easy for single system emulators to have a generic/general way of saving the state of the system, but with mame's 6000+ games on about 1000 sytems, it's just :banghead: |
| Shoegazer:
Wow, I honestly had no idea there was even a generic savestate. I just figured there were either game specific saves or nothing at all - and that the numbered save states only worked on games that actually supported them on a per-game basis. Do you suppose there would be any value, then, in having mame attempt to autosave on exit with EVERY game, using the generic savestate only when no game-specific savestate is detected? Perhaps not since this could introduce confusion about non-working games, as you suggest, but still it should at least be an OPTION, even if it is off by default, no? Also, there's this: last night I played Paperboy for the first time in quite a while and got a high score, and just for S&Gs reset the game. Sure enough, my initials and score were still there. Since Paperboy doesn't yet have game-specific savestate support, I believe this is due to its use of NVRAM, though I had no easy way of knowing other than to just play the game, get a high score and find out. So I'm curious to know if there's a way to create a filter, such as the ones on the left-hand panel in MAME32, for games that support not only game-specific savestates, but also NVRAM high score saving. Perhaps there's a way to do this other than manually entering each game? EDIT: The recent u releases have really blown away my theory that save state is getting more stable. Almost ALL of the games that currently support save state failed to load after upgrading from .118 to .118u3. Ah well. Shoegazer |
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