I need some help with emulator saves

I can talk about emulators without getting in trouble here right...?

I'm having trouble saving on the emulators FCE Ultra GX and Snes9x GX, or maybe I just don't know how to save right. With FCE I just don't know how to save at all, there is an option that says "save state," but it doesn't seem to do anything, AT ALL. If I try to load the "save" it just starts me at the beginning. I know a lot of older games don't have save functions, but I heard that emulators have their own save functions.

With the Snes9x Gx there's 2 options save SRAM(?) and snapshot(?). (I don't know what either of these mean exactly, some explanations would be nice.) Sorry about being such a noob by the way. They seem to be able to save, but my little brother will play and save (he's way behind me) and It will go over MY saves, which is not good at all, but with any proper save function there should be a way to save multiple files

The visual boy emulator saves just fine.

Thanks for reading that, hope some of you guys can help me out

Snapshot is a savestate, i.e. the emulator records the exact state of the emulated console for future retrieval.

SRAM is emulation of on-cart saves (i.e battery backup for SNES and NES games).

If the game itself never had an in-game save function, then you'll have to use savestates. Otherwise, I think Tantric's emulators are set up intially to automatically save the SRAM when you save in game (I think, otherwise it just saves SRAM every 30 seconds or something).

If the game you are playing has no save function, then only use Save Snapshot and Load Snapshot with it. You might be able to set the option "Auto-load Snapshot" in the settings menu, which will boot up the most recent snapshot whenever you launch the game. Save SRAM will have no effect in such games.

Now, the emulators are admittedly not set up in favour of multiple savegame managing. Although it's no longer the case that each save overwrites the previous one, you don't have that much control. I think you can load older states, but I've deduced a more effective method:

What I recommend is copying the roms of whichever games you want to play (games with built-in multiple save files, like Zelda or FF don't matter), and renaming one of them, for example:

Harvest_Moon.smc

Harvest_Moon_(brother).smc

Then, whenever you want to play the game, you load the first rom, while your brother loads the second rom. This way, the emulator will create separate save files (Harvest_Moon.frz and Harvest_Moon_(brother).frz, I think) due to it treating the two roms as different games.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/28/2009 01:17PM by alainvey.

Thanks for the multiple roms suggestion, that should work, thanks a lot!

BTW I'm still confused about saving with the FCE, the saves on zelda just never seem to stay

Have you tried selecting "load snapshot" when you start Zelda?

Start a new game, get the sword from the "It's Dangerous to go Alone!" man, then select "save snapshot" from the FCE Ultra menu. Close the emulator (using the exit option in its menu, don't just reset the console), then reload it and boot up Zelda. Select "load snapshot" from the menu.

If this doesn't work then there's a problem.

The FCE ultra doesn't say save snapshots, are you sure it's there?

Yes.

I was running an outdated version, I updated now, thanks for the heads up