So I was playing final fantasy 8 under my brand new lakka install and having tons of fun and had 2 saves for safety. However game crashed/exited 3 hours in and when I tried to continue I was told error no save files. My question is if there is a way to get it back or if lakka is not actually storing them. I am running the latest build as of jun 4th on the odroid c1 board. It appear non of the ps1 games are saving at all any possible reasons why?
RetroArch only writes saves to file when you “exit cleanly” (for example, using the ‘quit retroarch’ option on the main menu). If the program crashed instead, it never actually got written. There is an option for ‘SRAM Autosave’ that will write it to file periodically (every 10 seconds or so, IIRC).
If you do an in-game save and then exit cleanly and it still doesn’t have your saves available, there must be something else going on.
That was the issue does auto save 10 seconds affect performance? I just moved it to every 30 seconds.
Yeah, it can be an issue, depending on the size of the save, the power of the host machine and the write speed of the storage it’s being saved to, which is why it’s off by default.
I don’t think it should be an issue with memory cards though. Data is small enough to flush to disk each 10 secs with no issues
Well on an odroid-c1 and a 32gb microsd doesn’t seem to be destroying any performance on the ps1 emulator (with 30 second intervals) which I would have to guess is the most resource intensive option though not sure in regards to file size. The default setting should have a sensible enough balance that accounts for protecting game saves and changed system settings. If I had to guess, unless the save interval is ruining game-play constantly, most people would prefer to not worry about potentially losing hours of game-play unless they remember to reboot the system to save. Perhaps rather than turning it off a sensible default timing could be debated and tested? Just a suggestion, I am just happy the issue was solved for me 
It’s a big problem on consoles, such as Wii and PS3, which have terrible I/O. RetroArch supports many platforms and the defaults have to be chosen on a basis of lowest-common-denominator.