Disable Autosave on game exit

Espgaluda

Hi all, thanks in advance for any forthcoming advice - i'm currently using a RP3 on Retropie version 4.4.1 & setting up a SNES library.
I was wondering if there was a way of disabling the auto creation of a .srm file on game exit (start+select).
Obviously i'd still like the file creating on manual saves at savepoints etc?
I'm literally the biggest noob here, i have very little experience in the fray (only had the Pi a week) so any idiot guide that may point me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

dankcushions

can you tell us why?

i think the short answer is you can’t have it both ways. the file is always created on exit unless you turn saves off entirely.

mitu

@espgaluda I don't think that is possible. Disabling the .srm file creation would disable also any in-game saves, because the emulator does not know about your progress.

Espgaluda

@dankcushions said in Disable Autosave on game exit:

can you tell us why?

Primarily i was thinking of sd card longevity, my kids hop in & out of these games in machine gun rhythm so frequently that i was concerned that sectors of the card maybe 'worn out' over time.

Manuel saves are far less frequent & i'd hoped for a little breathing room between sd purchases.

cyperghost

@espgaluda Don't worry your card won't be broken by creating srm savefiles ;) The SD card killers are typically log files that goes wild. If you are worried about this I would suggest to redirect srm savepath to /dev/shm that's RAM area and will be flushed after next reboot.

You can use SavePath script to change pathes of SRM and even SAVESTATES. But I don't understand your concern about the write levels.

dankcushions

@espgaluda the files are only updated if the SRM content has changed, but the game may do this for reasons beyond the user actually triggering a save (some games even use them as a sort of temperature memory). the emulator just has no real way of telling that you have done a save within the game.

Clyde

@espgaluda said in Disable Autosave on game exit:

Primarily i was thinking of sd card longevity, my kids hop in & out of these games in machine gun rhythm so frequently that i was concerned that sectors of the card maybe 'worn out' over time.

That is prevented by Wear Levelling in modern flash memory. In short, every write will be saved in another memory cell than the original one. You usually don't have to worry about it, as the flash controller takes care of it automatically.

As @cyperghost said, some files may be critical because of a very high writing rate, but trust us, your kids aren't physically able to reach that rate by far. :) A highly crammed SD without much free cells for wear levelling can also be at a higher risk for failure, but the controller usually reserves some space for that.

Paranoid people could use the ram disk /dev/shm and save its contents to the SD at system shutdown to get the best of both worlds. But then again, I don't think that's necessary in your case, as long as you don't fill your SD up to the last megabyte.

Espgaluda

Thanks for the input guys - really appreciated.
Paranoia overload it seems? :)

Clyde

@espgaluda said in Disable Autosave on game exit:

Paranoia overload it seems? :)

It happens to all of us from time to time. :)

cyperghost

@espgaluda said in Disable Autosave on game exit:

Thanks for the input guys - really appreciated.
Paranoia overload it seems? :)

It's not paranoia at all. To be true because it costs a lot of time to setup a good romset. Therefore I suggest to use an external device for ROM/Artwork/Snapshots/Savegames and the system is just on SD card. Here is a guide with the How To: https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Running-ROMs-from-a-USB-drive

This method gots the advantage that in case of a backups you don't have to mess around with 128GB files and ROMs vs. Systems are separated ;)

My setup is: 4 GB SD-card just for RetroPie
16GB USB device for ROMs
est.: since 2016 with symlink

Clyde

That, and always remember, the best way to protect your data are backups. The best system setup won't help you if your hardware fails, gets stolen, etc.

A friend of mine once lost six hard drives when the power supply died and took them with it.

Espgaluda

Thanks again - i dare say this will be the 1st in a long series of hand holding noob questions! :)

The bezel project is a new enigma. . . . . . .