Create cloud saving feature

I was just playing one of my favorite gba games when I accidentally hit load state instead of save state and I lost all of my progress. I think it’d be a great idea to enable cloud saves through forum accounts to save people from accidentally overwriting or not saving their progress and it’d be a good feature for those that like to use different platforms for RA and keep their progress.

I know a number of users keep their saves in a dropbox share and sync them across their devices.

I disagree, a user should always be responsible for his own saves. Adding support for cloud-based services would just end up bloating up the code and cause unnecessary maintenance trouble for the developers. Creating a manual backup of your saves is easy, quick and gives you full control over your files without having to rely on a third-party server. In any case, savestates are a REALLY bad habit and should be avoided as much as possible.

I see some use on cloud saving for people coding actual games with libretro, but yeah you’re right, this isn’t an OS it’s a frontend for games and emulators

Where are the saves anyway? I searched forum and it says var/mobile/documents/.Retroarch but I do not have such a folder in that location

It is there but you need to enable the viewing of hidden folders in ifile.

I think cloud saving can be a great and easy to implement idea if you just tie our save states to the forum accounts. Manually moving files between devices is cumbersome especially when they’re on iOS devices.

1.) How do you even set RetroArch to autoload a state from a folder that is online (a dropbox account file), and autosave a state to a dropbox account on an iPhone 5S running RetroArch?

2.) If you allow cloud saves, people can switch between different portable devices when one finally loses battery.

For instance, usually I can’t play pokemon emerald on my 5S for very long (on fast forward of course) without losing a big chunk of needy battery life, but I enjoy the portability of my 5S. If I need to conserve battery, I could switch to my iPad (more cumbersome, but I can dig the extra screen real estate [not necessary or very useful]) and not lose the progress I had when I left my 5S game. Or I could get on my macbook and play there without having to do the file server save file switch deal.

This can benefit everyone and yes it is at the expense of simplicity and ease of maintenance for the devs but I’m sure people will love the new feature. Anything goes right? Onward, to infinity

I would like dropbox support too, but if you add dropbox people will as for box.net, if you add box people will ask for google drive, etc. Adding these features would add bloat and distract from the main project’s goals in my opinion.

If you are jailbroken you can use iFile to perform a two way sync between a folder and your dropbox. I use a similar approach in android using dropsync