Originally Posted by Benzonia
I just discovered that RetroArch is not compatible with previous savestates of its earlier emulators. This seems to be a pretty significant problem in my mind.
For example, previous versions of FCEU used a savestate file extension of .fc1, .fc2, .fc3, etc for each save state. SNESNext used .001, .002, etc for its savestates. However, RetroArch now uses .state1, .state2, etc for all savestates across all emulators. I didn't think that was a problem until I tried renaming my previous savestates to the new file extension, hoping it'd work...
It totally doesn't work, they aren't compatible. RetroArch can't even load the SNES savestates, and the NES ones seem to load what appears to be a screenshot of the savestate but not in its entirety.
This is a major problem for me, as I have invested hundreds of hours across many different games that I will be losing if I can't port these savestates over. I'm hoping the compatibility will be implemented in future releases or else I'll be stuck using the older versions of the emulators just so that I can access my saves.
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Will not happen for several reasons -
1) SNES9x Next is a heavily customized version of SNES9x that has gone through many changes on a monthly basis - including the savestate format. At this point, it's not meant to be backwards compatible with any version's savestates.
2) FCEUmm is different to FCEUX and most likely uses different savestates.
I could eventually look into a way to preserve savestate compatibility with SNES9x 1.53 - but that would mean a lot of code backtracking that I don't really have time for at this stage since I want to use that time for lots of new cores/ports.
Alternatively, I could port SNES9x 1.53 to PS3/360 - but honestly, there is a reason why I made a heavily customized version of it in the first place - a lot of games will not reach fullspeed on it by now, so there's no point really to including that.
Also, I might save you some time - VBA Next's savestates will not be compatible with VBA-M/VBA either. VBA-M and SNES9x needed to be heavily altered for speed reasons. Either I release 'zero-effort' ports and performance will absolutely suck on PS3/360, or I release customized versions where most games reach fullspeed.