MAME Save States

[bleemus]

Since I used to know C quite well, I'm trying to get into the MAME code a little bit to get myself back up to snuff (been in the business world for 2 years and they only have me to ASP in VB.NET and C# stuff, which my grandma could do...) and maybe try to get some more save states working, being that hiscore support has been dropped.

First I have been looking into the games that I want to have save state, since I play them... but the first 2 that I tested Rush'n Attack (gberet) and SFII CE (sf2ce) both seem to do fine when I use save and load state manually.

Is there things that are keeping them on the "unsupported" save state list?  I have been pretty much just going through the game for about 10 minutes and saving the state every minute or so while doing things I think might break it.  Nothing so far has.  Any ideas?

[Howard_Casto]

They aren't officially supported because they weren't tested. 

Games that officially support states allow the use of the auto-save feature, those that aren't don't.  That is the main difference.

[Buddabing]

Since I used to know C quite well, I'm trying to get into the MAME code a little bit to get myself back up to snuff (been in the business world for 2 years and they only have me to ASP in VB.NET and C# stuff, which my grandma could do...) and maybe try to get some more save states working, being that hiscore support has been dropped.

First I have been looking into the games that I want to have save state, since I play them... but the first 2 that I tested Rush'n Attack (gberet) and SFII CE (sf2ce) both seem to do fine when I use save and load state manually.

Is there things that are keeping them on the "unsupported" save state list?  I have been pretty much just going through the game for about 10 minutes and saving the state every minute or so while doing things I think might break it.  Nothing so far has.  Any ideas?

Typically all drivers in a source file need to be tested. Gberet may work okay, but mrgoemon has rom banking that gberet doesn't have, and may not work.

In the other driver you mentioned, there may also be variables in some games that aren't in others, which may affect state saves. Some examples are: cps1_sound_fade_timer and dial.

I'm glad someone else is working on state saves. Make sure you read Aaron's 4-part blog article on the subject.

[bleemus]

I'm glad someone else is working on state saves. Make sure you read Aaron's 4-part blog article on the subject.

That is what got me interested.

Typically all drivers in a source file need to be tested. Gberet may work okay, but mrgoemon has rom banking that gberet doesn't have, and may not work.

Thanks for the info, I'll look into it.

I'm glad someone else is working on state saves.

I've looked at most of the mamedev site, is there anywhere that people can post what they are working on so we are sure there isn't any duplicate working going on?

[Buddabing]

I've looked at most of the mamedev site, is there anywhere that people can post what they are working on so we are sure there isn't any duplicate working going on?

Typically people don't do that. They just submit code. MAME u releases happen almost every week so the chances of submitting duplicate work is pretty low.

But feel free to post on mame.net, I don't think anyone will care.