Home Page Forums MAME MAME SVN builds - new driver flood

Given the increasing number of consoles supporting save states, in many cases 36 save slots (one for each alphanumeric key) were definitely a small number when playing systems like nes or gba with thousand of existing games

most emulators automatically use game names for save states, but as in the snapshot case, in MESS things are a bit trickier because for instance if you are running


you would likely prefer to have save states named after the CD game "draculax" and not after the Super CD System cart. Or again, if you are running a computer game whose disk goes in drive 2 and require a CP/M disk to be mounted in drive 1


you don't want the save states to be named after the CP/M disk...

Long story short, rev. 23207 adds a new -statename option which allows to specify how save states should be stored inside the sta/ directory. Syntax is the basically the same as -snapname syntax:

- default behavior is "-statename %g", which stores save states in a per-system folder inside sta/ (so e.g. all gameboy games store their saves in sta/gameboy/ )
- suggested value for consoles supporting a single cart is "-statename %g/%d_cart", so that the name of the game in the cartslot will be used to store the saves (so e.g. "mess gameboy -cart sml" will save its states in sta/gameboy/sml/ )
- for home computers you have to see which disk drive contains the OS, if any, and which contains the game and adjust the option accordingly, using %g/%d_flop1 for drive 1, %g/%d_flop2 for drive 2, etc.

These changes don't affect NVRAM/EEPROM/FLASH saves, but only the emulator save states, so don't throw away your .nv files

Also, you still modify the root folder for save states with the -state_directory, nothing changes in that regard, and -statename only affects the location relative to state_directory

many thanks go to Kaylee who brought up the point well before 0.149, so that it was possible to add the new feature and make next release friendlier for users which want to test robustness of our save states!