Cnconsistent saving and save states

RetroArch General
#1

Hi there, looking to see if anyone has any solutions to this issue I’ve ran into;

For the past few days I’ve been delving into some Final Fantasy VIII and IX, and with both games I’ve lost hours worth of progress (first happened with IX which prompted me to move onto VIII, now it’s happened to that too).

I’m using the in-game save method, as well as using save state from the quickmenu, always making sure to “shut down content” through the RetroArch menu before pressing escape twice to shut down.

Twice now the in-game save and external save state has been <3h from where it was supposed to be, missing multiple saves and save-states that I had performed during the missing progress.

The “Date Modified” information for the save states in the retroarch/states folder is correct, but the save data itself is widly off.

This has really put me off of playing any sort of long-form game through RetroArch, I never had this issue once when I used to use ePSXe.

I’m using Beetle PSX HW if that is of any relevence, I also have the auto save feature set to every 900s, but evidently that has not worked either.

Would be interested to see if there is a fix for this or if anyone else has experienced the same thing.

I’m using version 1.8.5 on Win7.

Thanks!

#2

This happened to me as well some years ago and I’ve definitely learned my lesson. Don’t use both methods, especially on RPGs. Once you load a save state it automatically replaces whatever was in the game’s internal backup RAM with the data that was there at the time of the save state. Hope you understand. I suggest you just use the in game save method at least for RPGs.

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#3

It just happened to me again. The running theme so far seems to be related to changing disc on multi-disc games. Do you remember if you’d gone onto a next disc when you lost recent saves/save states?

#4

For me it had nothing to do with multi-disc based games. Stop using both save states and in game save. It’s gonna mess you up. Choose 1 method and stick to it. I think they implemented a toggle to either either prevent or allow RetroArch from overwriting the internal backup RAM when loading save states though. Have you stopped using both save states and in game save at the same time?

#5

FYI: There is a setting to prevent overwriting savegames (*.srm / *.mcr) when you load a savestate:

Settings
    └ Saving
        └ Don't overwrite SaveRAM on loading savestate

Best practice: Make a savestate save immediately AFTER you made a ingame save

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