State-save issues
 

Hi,

triggered by a new attempt to play my old favourite The Surgeon again, I started to experiment with the state-save feature of WinUAE. WOW! That's what I call handy! :)

Anyway, I found three small issues. One is that if you have just loaded a state-save file, re-loading the same one again makes WinUAE crash.
The second is that you MUST use the same configuration you used when saving the game state, otherwise: bad luck!
WinUAE would just crash with a random configuration.
The last maybe isn't *that* important: without a kickstart you cannot load a savestate-file, seems this is because of copyright reasons because in theory, someone could just load a state, reset the machine and WALLA ... there's the kickstart! ;-) :nervous

A sample file is in the zone.

You need Kickstart because Kickstart ROM isn't stored in state file. Copyright is one reason, another is state file size. (Storing KS image to state file would make it 512Kb bigger, state file size is RAM size + couple of kilobytes for CPU/CIAs/custom chip registers)

Configuration is needed because only part of configuration is loaded from state file. This will be fixed in future versions..

Thanks for state file. Reloading should not cause crashes..

How about compressing the save state file when saving and decompressing it into RAM again when loading. I sent a mail to codepoet about this but I don't think anyone read it. :scream

The Surgeon state loading fixed. (Partially fixed by me, another bug was fixed by Bernd)

State file compression will be implemented in future.

Thank you. (By the way, what was the cause?)
I hope that it was only an example for a couple of games, and that this fixed many similar crashing problems with save-state files for everybody. :) You had fixed lots of floppy-loading problems in the past, and thus made another shelf of games relive on the emulator, sometimes by applying just ONE fix :)

Toni,

I've found out something that can be very FATAL regarding save state saving: if the partition is full! This is not handled yet. I only had this once, but it can easily happen.
This will produce a file that's incomplete and that could possibly crash the whole system. I only need to remember the issues that occured with CCS64 (C64 emulator) with a BROKEN save state file...:rolleyes