One long-standing issue still in RetroArch is that it sucks at saving if you run into crashes,frustrating re-configs and large game progress lost,all bc the app was too lazy to save as it won’t save without exiting crashless.
Changing settings should have an option to auto save without needing an interval which would keep trying to save the settings too much when not needed due to not changing anything within the interval timer and also,there should be an ability to change core settings without opening games (N64 cores notoriusly crash with altered settings) in the core,let alone opening the core,so if crash prone settings are made,you don’t have to wipe out the changes to restore access to a core just to change it again,all that is needed is an option to edit core settings without booting the core,then it would pre-save and modify settings before going into it,so if anyone trashed the settings and its crashing every time the core is opened,you’d simply choose the edit core settings option to go restore to defaults or edit each change until you can stop the crashing.
For auto saving of global settings,it should save moments after making changes to settings on a slight delay to prevent overwhelming anything,maybe after each menu navigation only when something has been changed.
An example for save files and core/global settings alike for interval issues is,what if you exit before it has a chance to save your latest changes?
You will end up losing progress even though you enabled saving intervals.
This has the same cause for concern on a few stand-alone emulators that save on intervals instead of finding out when the game is being saved manually while in-game,so if you had saved in-game then exit too quickly,its like you never even saved that time,meaning you just lost a lucky spawn you first grinded for a long while,then recovered HP/MP and saved and started grinding again with the 1st hit being a rare encounter and you swiftly succeeded on it,saved the game,then (too quickly) exited for the session before it had the chance to save your lucky encounter/spawn (interval recently saved just before first save) thus at worst losing BOTH saves and tons of grinding!
It would also be nice if someone could make a helper app to change RA’s global settings in case of messing up menu input or something else breaks after tinkering settings then finding that it saved them when using Home to exit RA.
This alone could change both global and core specific settings if you can access the downloaded cores to gain access to the lists of settings for each core,or otherwise look at the same cores server to grab all settings for each and every core for Android that you can change for any given core dynamically and edit afterwards.
With that,you could change everything,also without having to reflect changed menu inputs in order to navigate and select things in the off chance you delete a vital navigation button during mapping them like the selection button that is the only way to remap stuff that becomes inaccessible and immediately locks you out of using RA,requiring you to edit or delete the configuration in order to restore the input for selecting options to fix it,a helper app could quickly fix it.
Its cumbersome to edit the configuration file on Android via a text editor bc you don’t have a computer’s simplicity of opening something like notepad to immediately edit the custom core config directly from a reserved folder task on a taskbar to tinker with things.
I wish Android had a full computer style option to get the best of it all like a Windows style UI with fully functional keyboard and mouse access.
Still can’t so much as touch anything in RA on Shield TV.
