Can't save rom menu settings in mame

RetroArch Windows devices
#1

I’m not able to save my tab menu settings on individual roms under mame. I change the video sliders, controller buttons, dip switches, whatever and when I exit and reload the rom/game, the settings are back to where they were before.

There seems to be a “mame” folder in my rom folder that has “cfg” files for many of the games, but it doesn’t seem to be saving my changes. I’ve also made changes to the retroarch settings under “configuration” and “saving” and nothing seems to help.

I’d also like to be able to save the high scores and other game player selections upon exiting too, as if the game machine remained plugged in. Is this possible?

While I’m on the discussion of saving games in retroarch, is it possible to save game states for NES and SNES, and to save games for like “Zelda” that saved games via battery backup? I haven’t tested this too much. Just got the games running. I also noticed that loading N64 games doesn’t seem to find any memory packs installed and doesn’t appear to be saving game progress. What can I do for these games to turn this functionality on?

I have actually researched some of this but can’t find a solution that will work for me. I appreciate any help!

#2

Dunno about the MAME stuff. Have you already looked at the many threads that cover that sort of thing? http://libretro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1395 http://libretro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1758 etc.

As for in-game saves, there shouldn’t be anything that needs to happen to enable it. It saves to the content directory by default unless you change your save directory to somewhere else. States should write to file immediately but SRAM saves only get written when you exit “cleanly” (that is, from the ‘quit retroarch’ entry in the menu) unless you have the SRAM write interval option enabled.

#3

Thanks! So what worked was manually adding a “MAME” folder under “saves” with sub folders “cfg” and “nvram”. I loaded up a game, made some random changes, and noticed they held. A “cfg” for that game showed up in the new “MAME/cfg” folder. I don’t understand why the folders aren’t generated automatically but it works. Will this also save any high scores in the game? Thanks again for pointing me in the right direction.

I noticed there are a lot of “srm” files in the “saves” folder that are for most of my Nintendo games. I haven’t gotten the chance to try out whether it saves the games too much, I just thought I’d ask about them before I got into it. I did notice that the two Sega Master System games I have don’t appear to have srm files, but maybe they don’t need them since there’s no save capability with that machine? I don’t know much about the SMS myself actually.

Was is the difference between a SRAM and a save state? I think I did turn on automatic SRAM writing. Is there a keyboard shortcut or a way to map SRAM writing to a controller? Is there a keyboard shortcut to close retroarch cleanly?

Sorry for all the questions. It.s been a long road getting this all setup, but I do see light at the end of the tunnel.

#4

SRAM is in-game saves, states are just a snapshot of the emulator at that moment. SRAM saving is stable and should work across versions and even in other emus entirely (for example, an srm generated by snes9x should also work in bsnes), while savestates are extremely volatile and may not even work after small changes to a core.

I think using the esc button exits cleanly and you can change that ‘exit’ hotkey map in the retroarch.cfg file.

#5

I am having a similar problem. I’ll use Burgertime as an example. First under “dip switches” I have the lives set to “5”. Then under Cheats I have “infinite pepper”. I do a save state.

Have it set to automatically load state on start of game. It does that because in the preview (before the game starts) I see five lives and the pepper counter is at 99 (the max).

Here’s what happens, though. When I hit “1” to start the game, it all disappears and I have three lives and 5 peppers.

Any thoughts?

#6

Jallen99…You said what worked was…adding a “MAME” folder under “saves” with sub folders “cfg” and “nvram”. Where is this “saves” you are referring to. I want to do the same thing but don’t see a “saves” in the directory structure.

Any help is greatly appreciated.