The new [core].opt and save sorting options are great, but

RetroArch General
#1

Having the option to finally separate the [core].opt settings and save them in their designated cfg folders instead of having one big opt file in the root folder (and having to browse through a wall of text to find the core you want) is great.

The similar handling for the save files also sounds great but there is a problem. Instead of separating the save files per system, it separates them by core. The issue with this is that there are a few systems that share multiple cores. For instance, there are 3 different N64 cores and all of them are useful. Lots of SNES cores too and i personally love to test all of them. But having the saves separated this way means you have to copy the contents of, say, the ParaLLel folder into the Mupen64 folder. This means a lot of duplicate files for no reason, that’s added bloat. Not to mention having to manually update the saves for the other folders by finding out which files were more recently modified and other similar headaches.

I think the saves should be separated by system. This way all SNES saves will be shared via all SNES cores, N64 saves by all N64 cores and so on. It’s much more useful this way.

#2

It’s a bad idea since moving sram saves between emulators doesn’t always work out right. I know when I moved from VBA-M to mGBA, some saves weren’t compatible and upon loading them in mGBA they were wiped. But since they were backed up in the saves/VBA-M folder, I could use a conversion tool to fix them and bring them over to mGBA.

#3

I wasn’t aware the GBA saves had compatibility issues between cores. I mostly test things with SNES and N64 and i never had such issue with those. Right now im using all files in the root saves folder.

#4

Another example: I had to use the stand alone version of Desmume to load saves made by the core and export them in raw format to get them to work with the melonDS core.

#5

If you really want, you can set this up manually with symlinks on Linux (not sure about Windows), for example:

savefiles/SNES                            # the folder with saves
savefiles/bsnes HD -> SNES/               # symlink
savefiles/Snes9x -> SNES/                 # symlink
savefiles/Snes9x 2010 -> SNES/            # symlink
2 Likes
#6

That’s a good idea, i know how to do this on Windows but i didn’t think of it.