Posted: 3/14/2014 11:48 AM
Post subject: Savestates question
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Aaron_Haynes
Joined: 2/3/2006
Posts: 69
I don't really know the terminology to easily describe what I'm talking about here, but I'll give it a shot. I'm drilling individual stages in Mega Man 5, so I wanted to create a savestate for each room that was giving me trouble. Since there's only 10 slots, I figured it'd be simplest to make copies of the rom file, one for each stage. But when I make a new savestate in one of them, it changes it for all of them. I guess this is because BizHawk checks the rom's ID, rather than storing savedata for each individual file? So any copy of the file I open shares its 10 save slots with any other copy. Is there any way around this?
Posted: 3/14/2014 12:28 PM
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adelikat
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Bizhawk uses the name of the ROM to generate the savestate. So if you load another rom of hte same name, it will use the same 10 slots. Simply rename your roms, like mm5-lv1.nes, mm5-lv2.nes, etc and you should be fine.
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Posted: 3/14/2014 1:43 PM
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Aaron_Haynes
Joined: 2/3/2006
Posts: 69
I tried renaming the .nes files, but they still share savestates with each other. Do I need another program to change something within the file itself?
Posted: 3/14/2014 2:17 PM
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adelikat
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Well, you are doing something wrong here. Bizhawk doesn't look at anything in the file to try to tie savestates and roms. It simply uses filename. What does your /savestates folder look like? For bizhawk mm5.nes and mm5-blah.nes are two different files (regardless if the files are identical), and will generate two different sets of saveslots.
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Posted: 3/14/2014 2:36 PM
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Flip
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And if the quicksave slots 0-9 aren't sufficient, you can choose to save as a 'named state' instead. This requires file names for each save, but you can have unlimited per game.
Posted: 3/14/2014 6:31 PM
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zeromus
Editor, Emulator Coder
Joined: 8/7/2008
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actually, it seems, bizhawk uses the 'name of the rom' which can come from the gamedb after it gets hashed and detected. Only if the game is unrecognized will the filename get used. This is pretty unusual for an emulator. There was some kind of decent reason for this, but I can't remember it. We should probably make it a user option.
Posted: 3/15/2014 1:32 AM
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Aaron_Haynes
Joined: 2/3/2006
Posts: 69
Yeah, I was getting no luck changing the filenames. MM5-star.nes, MM5-gravity.nes, didn't make a difference. Named states are a little hard to quickly access, but I found a good workaround for the moment, just storing sets of savestate files in a bunch of different folders and moving them back to the main save folder when I need them. An option to use filename instead of hashed rom name would be nice in the future, but this works for now. Thanks all!