Why are all Mupen64Plus save files so large?

RetroArch General
#1

Let me start off by saying I love RetroArch and your newest release 1.4.1 is great! There’s one weird issue that I don’t understand though. I store all of my saves in a folder for the designated core. Out of all of my folders the save files are relatively small for the most part. They’re around a few to several KB which I’m assuming is standard.

However, the Mupen64Plus save files are ridiculously large. Each file is 67.6 MB. In total that’s 4.16 GB total for 63 games in total in that folder!

What I’m asking is why are the save files so large on this one core in particular? Stranger to me is the fact that all save files are exactly 67.6 MB in size with no variation, unlike all of the other cores. Does anyone know the explanation?

1 Like
#2

It’s because of the 64DD emulation. We haven’t added a check to only use the giant saves when absolutely necessary, so, for now, it’s huge saves across the board.

GlupeN64-libretro doesn’t have this issue, so I would recommend switching over to it for non-DD games in the short term.

#3

Thanks. That makes a lot of sense. I just wanted to bring this to your attention to make sure it wasn’t an oversight. Is there a way to compress my saves to smaller files now while switching to GlupeN64?

#4

hmm, not sure. You might try loading up a saved game and then delete the giant srm file once it’s loaded and then when you save again, it should (hopefully) write the smaller save to file.

#5

Just a small update. After opening the games on GlupeN64 and saving and closing them properly, saves went back to the previous file size (290KB here).

Just in time for my anual save backup :stuck_out_tongue:

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#6

Another update…

Make sure you backup your save files!

After some tests going back and forth between the cores, I managed to corrupt the save file. (of course I had a backup by then). It seems one of my computers can’t run GlupeN64 (it has a really old radeon hd3200 integrated in the northbridge), and while I was troubleshooting, my really old Mario64 save (from pj64, more than 10yo probably) reset.