Save/Savestate Problems: Read This

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Deathlike2
ZSNES Developer
ZSNES Developer
Posts: 6747
Joined: Tue Dec 28, 2004 6:47 am

Save/Savestate Problems: Read This

Post by Deathlike2 »

You are reading this because:

1) You are not able to create a savestate (a message tells you so).

2) After saving in game, the next time you come back to play the game, the save does not exist.

Possible issues that may apply to you:

1) You did not define a save folder.

2) You are loading a rom from a folder that has read only permissions such as a CDROM.

3) You did define a save folder, but it still does not quite work.

Solutions to applicable problems:

If you are affected by issue #1 and/or #2, make sure to define a save directory that has read/write permissions. When a folder is not defined, ZSNES attempts to load/store savestates (ZST) and save games (SRM) in the same folder the ROM was loaded from. The problem with that is if you are loading the ROM from a CDROM, or a folder with read only permissions. If you don't know how to change folder permission, please google for the answer. You may not have the proper user permissions to make the changes to the folders.

If you are affected by issue #3, make sure to have created the folder with read/write permissions in advance. Also, make sure the path is valid. If you are using Linux, make sure that the path is entered in via zsnesl.cfg with the proper case (in other words, case sensitivity matters).

If you know nothing on paths, please google about them.

If you are using a relative path, make sure you know how to type in a relative path.

Valid relative paths include:
save
save\
.\save
.\save\

Please google up relative paths if you are planning to use them.
Continuing [url=http://slickproductions.org/forum/index.php?board=13.0]FF4[/url] Research...
adventure_of_link
Locksmith of Hyrule
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Post by adventure_of_link »

Many users, new and old alike, have been asking questions regarding importing/exporting save files. While this has came up numerous times in the board's history, here's a general FAQ on how to import/export saves.

Battery-backed Saves
These saves come from the onboard S-RAM on certain carts (Super Mario World, Earth Bound, Final Fantasy series, Zelda, and a numerous amount of other games.) These particular files end in *.srm and are named based on the ROM from where it came from. These saves can be imported to other emulators, as the save scheme is the same throughout all SNES emulators, old and new. These should be relied upon whenever possible.

Save States
These saves are unique to the emulator itself. These saves save the entire state of the game and allows you to pickup exactly where you left off. While this sounds cool and useful (especially for those games that didn't offer a native save system of some kind), there are disadvantages to these states. For example, they cannot be imported/exported into an older emulator, as well as other emulators (with the exception for Snes9X's support of older ZSNES savestates) due to the way the emulator was coded. Also, things can break on you when using these states (Star Ocean comes to mind here.) Lastly, because it's saving the entire state of the game when you save the state, it also saves the S-RAM info. so for example, if you just got to the final battle with Ganon in Zelda then load a save state from, say, dungeon three in the dark world, you will have to play the game all over from that point on because it overwrote your S-RAM save. Oh, and the save states end in *.zsx (where x is either t, or a number between 0-9, although ZSNES has support for up to 100 states.)

Naming saves so it will work with your games
This is very simple. You either put the save state/S-RAM file into your ROM folder or defined saves folder, and name the file the same as your ROM, examples:

1.

Code: Select all

ROMfile.smc
ROMfile.srm
2.

Code: Select all

ROMfile.smc
ROMfile.zst
3.

Code: Select all

ROMfile.smc
ROMfile.zs1
Don't forget that when you name your save states zs1, zs2, or whatever, keep in mind that the number is the save slot you should load the save from. Oh yeah, keep in mind that S-RAMs and savestates aren't compatable with other games, so for example, a Super Mario World SRM won't work on Chrono Trigger, and a Megaman X2 savestate won't work on Megaman X3. Again, make sure that the savestate matches the version of ZSNES that it came from, example, ZSNES 1.36 savestates usually won't work on the latest versions. Lastly, if you are using an OS that uses case-sensitive filenames (Linux/UNIX, OSX, etc) the case must match exactly. So ROM.smc, rom.smc, and RoM.smc are three different filenames.
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