Mupen64plus: relationship between in-game save and savestate?

RetroArch General
#1

I’m wondering what the relationship is, if any, between in-game saves and the save state function on the retroarch menu. I thought that the answer would be none but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

The game I was playing was Banjo Kazooie. There are 3 in-game save slots. In the 3rd slot was a game I’ve been playing with my 4 year old that we had 30 hours in. In the 1st was a game my daughter started so she could learn the moves and play with us and it had an hour or so play time. In the 2nd I started a new game this weekend. I used the savestate at one point and turned retroarch off thinking it would save the game state including the state of the in-game slots as they were when I started. I reloaded the game and reloaded the save state. When I “saved and quit” using the B&K in-game menu, the in-game slots are completely different. The 2nd slot is right (the one I was playing) but the 1st and 3rd are completely different. I guess it resurrected a save from ?? well I don’t know. For example the 3rd slot should say 30 hours of play time and now it says 2, so where ever it is from is from a long long time ago?

Anyway, I guess those other games are gone now but I was hoping to gain some understanding of how the save state interacts with in-game saves so I can still use it (properly) without worrying about wiping out saves next time.

I’m running retro arch on android (fire tv) if that matters. I assume not so that’s why I posted here in general.

#2

That’s very strange. Your original intuition should be correct. That is, the savestate should include the SRAM and loading a state should load the SRAM from that state, which will then pollute/supersede the SRAM of the in-game saves. Does that make sense? There’s only one SRAM file, and any time you load a state, it should overwrite that SRAM file with the one from the state.

#3

It’s definitely very odd to me. I did change the directories retroarch saves to since I have a usb drive I use. Your response got me thinking maybe there is another sram file in the original location but no luck, those original folders are still deleted as expected.

If I make copies of the srm and save state files I should , in theory be able to just move them back right? If so I might make backups and see if I can reproduce the problem.

#4

Another option that may work for you is to put the SRAM saves into a dropbox sync directory, since they apparently support versioning/rollback of files.