Save State Support

[ferropop]

Was there any roadmap to getting proper Save State support in the SNES core? This feels like a pretty glaring oversight in an otherwise pitch-perfect core, and unfortunately one that really is a QOL bummer.

Is this a fairly complex thing to implement? I remember savestates being a thing on NESTicle in the 90s haha, but maybe I'm uneducated on the subject and speaking out of turn. Just curious!

[AngelicLiver]

Save states is not a straightforward feature to implement and the SNES core is one of the larger and more complex cores on MiSTer. With MSU-1 recently added it is really pushing it with how much room there is left on the FPGA.

I may be in the minority when I say I don't care about save states but I appreciate their utility.

[FoxbatStargazer]

Save states are doable in FPGA but have a much larger cost than software emulation. Robert did cram in save state support into the playstation core which is incredible, but claimed it took up nearly a quarter of the board's LEs. He also claimed that you need a clock control on every single element so you can simultaneously pause all elements before creating the state, which is extremely tedious to add after-the-fact. The only reason he added save states to the NES core was because it already was created with clocks included.

Now if the freaking Playstation can fit save states I'd think its possible for SNES as well. But it's also a hell of a lot of work to put on anyone at this point. In the meantime I recommend the cheat database for level skips because I also don't like to sit down for hour+ gaming sessions too often.

[ferropop]

Thanks for the info, was curious what the reasons might be given that it has been such a standard thing for 20+ years.

[hainer92]

There's also something more charming about level skip cheats than save states - they're less exploitable to me. I remember a friend who'd reload a save state before every major RNG roll until he got the roll he wanted haha!

[akeley]

For me cheats are a not a substitute for save states. You can't really apply them in RPGs, where I'd mostly love to use them, and even in other games they feel like, well, cheating.

[Wave]

It was definitely a weird experience realizing that I wanted to play a SNES game on MiSTer but didn't want to keep at it long enough to finish it. So in the absence of save states suddenly level warp cheats felt waaaay more valuable than ever before. But yeah, such cheats don't apply to every genre, and some games don't have relevant cheats... no good solution sometimes.

[Reed_Solomon]

Was there any roadmap to getting proper Save State support in the SNES core? This feels like a pretty glaring oversight in an otherwise pitch-perfect core, and unfortunately one that really is a QOL bummer.

Is this a fairly complex thing to implement? I remember savestates being a thing on NESTicle in the 90s haha, but maybe I'm uneducated on the subject and speaking out of turn. Just curious!

Save states exist on the FXPak/SD2SNES and that's open source. It would be nice to see save states on the SNES core for sure some day if anyone wants to take on that challenge.

[ferropop]

Was there any roadmap to getting proper Save State support in the SNES core? This feels like a pretty glaring oversight in an otherwise pitch-perfect core, and unfortunately one that really is a QOL bummer.

Is this a fairly complex thing to implement? I remember savestates being a thing on NESTicle in the 90s haha, but maybe I'm uneducated on the subject and speaking out of turn. Just curious!

Save states exist on the FXPak/SD2SNES and that's open source. It would be nice to see save states on the SNES core for sure some day if anyone wants to take on that challenge.

Would totally support a Patreon to incentivize this happening, no questions asked.

[the_importer]

Give it time. Console wize, we're getting close to hitting a wall soon, so I'm confident that we'll get save states in the Big 3 (SNES/Gen/PCE) this year if not the next one.

[Mr. Encyclopedia]

Yeah as time goes on and all the major consoles that can appear on MiSTer are complete I'm sure the developer community will circle back to add newer features to the older cores.