I’m using Retroarch on my Nexus 7. Have only been fooling around with SNES so far on the SNES 9x 1.53 core. Works great and save states work fine but I seem to be unable to get the games to save in their normal RAM mode. I can still play them using the save states but I would like to be able to use the SRAM so I can play it more “normally”. Not rooted. When I look in the settings both savefile and savestate dir are set to "<content dir>, and since the save states are working fine I’m puzzled about why the SRAM doesn’t seem to be functional. What am I doing wrong?
SRAM only gets written to file on exit. If you’re not exiting “cleanly”, it never gets written. To make sure that it gets written, be sure to use the ‘quit retroarch’ menu option or load another game before exiting. There’s also an option in settings > saving called SaveRAM Autosave Interval, which will let it write to file periodically (every 10 seconds is the default, I think…?) instead of just on exit.
Quitting “properly” did it, thanks!
Why can’t it detect the saving natively and update the SRAM file then? This is the primary reason I lost a huge chunk of progress in a game thanks to a black screen glitch from switching apps to figure out something I was stuck on and force stopping it to “fix” the black screen,only to find myself all the way back to several areas ago!
You would think it is easily possible to notice when say,in Earthbound,saving on the dad calling,triggering the SRAM,and saving the game immediately. Had to bring this up because saving is really important for many games,and this is a blatant issue if you play a game that may eventually freeze,crash,or softlock if compatibility fluctuates,the device has a random quirk,or RetroArch itself freaks out for whatever reason. Device quirks can be common in Android across all firmwares.
Enable SRAM autosave, It’s on settings/saving/
Many games use SRAM not for saving but for RAM, and if we write to file any time there’s a change, those games will be constantly writing to disk, which would not only run into I/O issues on some platforms, it could also drastically reduce the life of flash storage. The option Radius mentioned writes to disk periodically instead. There’s still a possibility of losing data if it crashes within the 10-second window between making an in-game save and writing to disk but that’s pretty unlikely.