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Saved State Format

Posted: September 21st, 2014, 11:36 am
by eltoddo
Just wondering if anyone has had a look at the saved state files. Is is possible to use these saved states in another emulator? I sent my RetroN5 back for RMA repair/replacement and want to continue playing my Final Fantasy IV GBA saved state in an emulator on my PC until my system is back. I was only a couple hours from finishing the game...

I've posted the saved state if anyone wants to have a look. Had to add .txt to the extension for it to attach.

I opened one of the .snapX in a text editor and found it starts with "RTN5" then the rest of the file is cryptic binary formatted data. Doesn't seem to be anything plain text in the save, but that's what I'd expect of a system RAM and Register dump.

Anyone figured out if their emulator is proprietary? It might help to know if they've reused existing emulator code.

Re: Saved State Format

Posted: September 21st, 2014, 12:49 pm
by Failrunner
I tried using these save states and the cart saves on retroarch but it didn't work. It would be awesome if it did. Never tried it on pc though.

Re: Saved State Format

Posted: December 31st, 2014, 3:32 pm
by 1pil
That's right. Save states used in R5 do NOT work on PC emulators. I can confirm that right now. Even the normal "SAV" files do nothing on pc emulators. Which is funny considering ".sav" extension is the exact same extension on most emulators....I can't even explain why emulators can't read it since it looks exactly the same. I even made sure the name of the file is the same as the rom file in order to attempt to load the save. But no. No luck....

Re: Saved State Format

Posted: December 31st, 2014, 5:55 pm
by hikaricore
I can only speculate that the format is altered in some way to make it incompatible. *shrug*

Re: Saved State Format

Posted: January 14th, 2015, 12:01 am
by Retron Tèch
We use a custom file format for saves, not to intentionally make it incompatible but rather to add compression and integrity protection. I'm happy to explain the format if anyone would like to work on PC-side tools.

Re: Saved State Format

Posted: January 15th, 2015, 2:18 pm
by 1pil
Probably would be a waste of your time. I doubt there is a way to make them compatible with pc emulators. It's either they can be or can't be. I think its as simple as that. And even if there was a way to allow conversion to pc emulator, I don't know if there would be any way to convert it back to allow R5 to read it again, it'll probably end up corrupting the file.

Re: Saved State Format

Posted: January 15th, 2015, 4:25 pm
by hikaricore
I'd like to see any details available on the format to be quite honest. Waste of time or not the more information the better

Re: Saved State Format

Posted: January 15th, 2015, 5:25 pm
by R9delta
Same. Any information when it comes to the inner workings of the Retron 5 is valued and always appreciated "fruitless" as it may be seen (can't say i agree with that at all anyway) especially when it's offered up by someone who has worked extremely hard on the Retron themselves and played a huge part in making it what it is.

Re: Saved State Format

Posted: January 15th, 2015, 10:46 pm
by Retron Tèch
The Retron save format is simply a wrapper for any arbitrary data. We deal with two types of saves: snapshots, which are not trivially portable, and SRAM saves which can be used with PC emulators etc. The same Retron save wrapper is used for both types, so any PC tool would inherently be able to deal with both - although I think only the SRAM saves would be of any value.

I'll post some further info when time permits.

Re: Saved State Format

Posted: January 15th, 2015, 11:28 pm
by R9delta
I had a feeling SRAM data wouldn't be too hard to convert over, thanks! Yeah any more info about it would be awesome if and when you get the time :) Thanks again so much