In-Game Saves Not Working

[lastcallhall]

So, I finally got everything up and running the way I wanted it, I fired up Kega Fusion, loaded Lunar, played for an hour, saved my game, shutdown the system, and turned off my machine. Came back an hour or so later, loaded up the game again - no save file. Double checked that Kega was set up correctly, it was, tried it again, no go. Tested ZSNES, loaded up SMB All Stars, finished level 1 of SMB3, saved, exited emulator. Loaded the emu again, loaded SMB again, nothing saved under SMB 3. Tried Zelda, LTTP, same thing. Tried Zelda II in Nestopia, same thing. Tested Mario vs DK in my VirtualGBA, same thing.

Anyone have any idea what's going on? I'd rather not use save states, as configuring them to the controller per in-game command would prove to be too cumbersome.

[lastcallhall]

Nevermind, I fixed it.

[fRequEnCy]

  On 2/15/2010 at 12:24 AM, lastcallhall said:

Nevermind, I fixed it.

LOL. Beat me to it! Glad you got it sorted out but good if you post the solution for someone else for future references.

[lastcallhall]

  On 2/15/2010 at 12:28 AM, fRequEnCy said:

LOL. Beat me to it! Glad you got it sorted out but good if you post the solution for someone else for future references.

I would, but I'm not exactly sure what I did; I manually set the BRM directory in Kega to the BIOS directory since the saves are running off of per BIOS, and the others I just launched the emulator externally once and saved a game w/o the FE getting in the way and the emus configured themselves from there... at least, that's what I THINK happened.

[fRequEnCy]

  On 2/15/2010 at 4:31 AM, lastcallhall said:

I would, but I'm not exactly sure what I did; I manually set the BRM directory in Kega to the BIOS directory since the saves are running off of per BIOS, and the others I just launched the emulator externally once and saved a game w/o the FE getting in the way and the emus configured themselves from there... at least, that's what I THINK happened.

Always run the emulator outside of GameEx first and set save paths when needed. Then once setup it will work in GameEx flawlessly.

[lastcallhall]

  On 2/15/2010 at 4:59 AM, fRequEnCy said:

Always run the emulator outside of GameEx first and set save paths when needed. Then once setup it will work in GameEx flawlessly.

::SIGH::

So, I sorta lied. I saved a Zelda save file using the emulator only, then went in using GameEx, deleted the file, created a new file, saved it, exited the FE, re-entered and it was still there. I thought things were ok. Not so much. It didn't work using SMB All Stars, nor did it work in my gameboy emulators.... Im gonna have to tinker around but I don't have the time right now to fix it. All my SEGA stuff works, though.

[lastcallhall]

Just a quick update - I got my Gameboy and Gameboy Color working, but my Gameboy Advance (using the same emulator, albeit a differnt copy) doesn't. ZSNES also refuses to make a save file (it turns out my success in Zelda was only the SRM file from before). I've set all my folders so read-only is disabled, I've made SRM save files in ZSNES, and when I run both emulators externally, I don't have a problem - they find the game, match the SRM file, and I'm good to go. I don't get it...

[Brian Hoffman]

  On 2/16/2010 at 3:39 AM, lastcallhall said:

Just a quick update - I got my Gameboy and Gameboy Color working, but my Gameboy Advance (using the same emulator, albeit a differnt copy) doesn't. ZSNES also refuses to make a save file (it turns out my success in Zelda was only the SRM file from before). I've set all my folders so read-only is disabled, I've made SRM save files in ZSNES, and when I run both emulators externally, I don't have a problem - they find the game, match the SRM file, and I'm good to go. I don't get it...

It has to do with exiting the emulator, Gameex kills the process, the emulator does not exit properly and the save files are not made. Just because you are in-game and choose save and it tells you ok you have to remember that it may not be writing to the sram file real time, This is why when you use the emulator outside Gameex all is well. You are also closing the emulator properly.

A good start would be to see what keys exit the emulator, then go into advanced configuration and map ESC to that key combination. This should resolve these issues.

[lastcallhall]

  On 2/16/2010 at 6:45 AM, Brian Hoffman said:

It has to do with exiting the emulator, Gameex kills the process, the emulator does not exit properly and the save files are not made. Just because you are in-game and choose save and it tells you ok you have to remember that it may not be writing to the sram file real time, This is why when you use the emulator outside Gameex all is well. You are also closing the emulator properly.

A good start would be to see what keys exit the emulator, then go into advanced configuration and map ESC to that key combination. This should resolve these issues.

That makes a lot of sense, and It's certainly something I don't mind trying out. ZSNES has an option where it saves SRAM in real time, so I wonder if I just turn that option on, would it save me the hassle of reprogramming everything in the frontend? I'm thinking so. As for Virtual Boy Advance, I still don't understand why it'll save to battery in real time for GB/GBC games, but fails to do so for GBA games... there has to be something else going on there. I'll take a look tonight when I get home and see what happens. Thanks for the help.

EDIT: Fixed! For ZSNES, turning on the option to save SRAM in real time worked like a charm, and in VirtualBoy Advance, I just needed to move the battery directory into the ROM directory and it worked. Now, I need to find a version of MAME that runs MK 2 and 3 flawlessly and I'm set. Done. It was a PITA to get these games and all my other games working perfectly, but I did it! I set up MAME 0.78 for the MK ROMs and the 0.135 for the rest of the games. Just made 2 seperate enteries in GameEx.