Retroarch on Shield, cannot save. Please help

RetroArch Android devices
#1

Hello all!

I’m new to the boards, the Shield and android as well. I used to play around with emulators all the time on PC in the great before time(pre marriage, career, being a stupid adult etc.). So far I am loving Retroarch and all it has to offer. I’ve managed to get pretty much every emulator to work for me with little to no effort. I have scoured this board and many like it for information on how to get things working swimmingly on my Shield. I thank you all for the info. I have one problem however that I have not seen anyone else have. If someone has had it and has posted it in these forums I am sorry that I am posting it again.

My problem is as follows… I CANNOT for the life of me, get any core to save a game, do a save state or take a screenshot. I’ve tried everything I know to try. Manual save state, in game saves, auto save and load save state. Nothing works. There is an error message that comes up when I try to manually save state. It says "failed to save state to “/storage/sdcard1"” I am a complete Android newb, but to me it seems like Retroarch cannot write to my SDCARD? I have lead it to a folder on the sdcard for saves(no luck) and I’ve also made sure it was not lead to the sdcard for saves (no luck). I have deleted all of retroarch’s files and uninstalled several times(no luck). Is there a setting I am missing somewhere? Anything you guys know of that I can try? I really like a lot of these older games but not quite enough to play them from start to finish every time I play :lol:

Thanks for your time! The Bionic Commando

#2

Yeah, this is a known issue due to KitKat’s new sandboxing rules for external storage. RetroArch will likely default to write to its own sandboxed directories in the future, but in the meantime, you’ll need to use SDFix (available for free from the Play store) if you’re rooted. If not rooted, you could try directing it to use internal storage, which I think is unrestricted (not 100% on that, though).

If anyone else has better suggestions, feel free to chime in.

#3

Thanks for the fast reply hunterk!

My Shield is not rooted. I’ve tried directing Retroarch to use the sd for saves and save states with no luck. =(

If I were to root my Shield what would it change? Can I root it and still have all the Nvidia front end stuff on it like it is now? Sorry I don’t know a lot about Android.

#4

All it does is remove the restrictions that companies (in this case, Nvidia) put there for your own good/safety. This means you can do a lot of things that are disallowed for whatever reason (frequently tethering on phones, removing baked-in crapware, etc.), but it also means you have to be a bit more careful about what you install and what you hand root privileges to.

Here are instructions for doing it on a Shield: http://www.xda-developers.com/android/h … eloper-tv/

You said you tried making it write to your SD, have you tried making it write to your internal storage instead? Dunno if that’s accessible to you, but RetroArch lives in /data/data/com.retroarch, so I would hope it can write to its own directory…

If nothing else works, sit tight for a bit and we’ll see about getting a version out that works better.

#5

Excellent! I will try leading it to its own directory first. If that doesn’t work I’ll root my Shield this evening.

Thanks for all your help. I’ll let you know how it goes.

#6

It is fixed!! I tried leading it to its own directory and that did not help. So I went ahead and rooted my shield, ran the sd fix app and voila! It works perfect! Auto save states and auto save state load work and everything. =D

Thanks to hunter for all your help. :slight_smile:

#7

Glad you got it going :smiley: