Dolphin Save Location Confusion

Libretro Cores
#1

I just noticed all my Gamecube saves in Dolphin are going to my actual …\Dolphin\User\GC location and not my RetroArch’s save location like everything else which is a custom location of “W:\Saves\Memory Card\dolphin-emu\User\GC”.

Everything else saves perfectly under W:\Saves\Memory Card<core name>. I transfered everything at once to this folder when I made it a few months ago, and my “MemoryCardA.USA.raw” still contains my saves - but the dolphin core doesn’t seem to understand it needs to read it from that location and goes back to my stand-alone Dolphin’s location.

I hope that makes sense, can anyone help me? It’s very important to me to keep all my saves in this location for portability.

#2

I don’t suppose dolphin-libretro goes through the normal libretro saving interface, but I suspect you can redirect the cores saves to the desired location through the core’s dolphin.ini.

#3

I dug a little deeper, and it had me super confused for a moment but I think I got it figured out.

Seems like the best way to configure this is to do a fresh install of Dolphin stand-alone, put “portable.txt” in the installation directory, run dolphin, configure everything as you normally would (ignoring retroarch directories at this point, just setup as normal) then when it’s all setup - transplant that User and Sys directories to your …\Save\dolphin-emu and …\System\dolphin-emu folders, respectively.

I think I had some weird configuration in the RetroArch version of my User folder in saves pointing back at a hard set directory for the MemoryCard.raw files.

This configuration, I set dolphin up to use GCI, which doesn’t ask for a directory, throw in portable.txt making that default directory a relative one, and it ends up being perfect for libretro’s save setup.

I know the directory transplant is like step 1 instructions for Dolphin, but I think the tweak with portable.txt and gci saves in the setup really helped it go smoother. I could be wrong, I could be missing something… or maybe it doesn’t matter.

I just know it works now, and I wanna leave this here in case anyone wants to read the info.

(I just wish I didn’t screw with something for a few hours, then make a post for help, and then always figure it out right after… what is this curse? lol)

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