Jump to saved state

[RetroPieRoss]

Hey all,

I recently visited the National Videogame Museum and they had a station where you could press a button and immediately jump to a bonus or special stage in a game. More details here.

I'd like to replicate this at home and am looking for some help achieving this. The button stuff I'm not too worried about as I'm using a Pi, but I'm unsure how to jump straight to a saved state. I'm guessing it's a runcommand of sorts, but not sure where to start.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[hawkes_84]

@RetroPieRoss hi, when mapping your buttons on your controller the hotkey + certain buttons will do certain functions such as Save Game, Load Game and change save slot
Here is which do what
Hot Key + Right Shoulder Button = Save Game
Hot Key + Left Shoulder Button = Load Game
Hot Key + left or right on D-Pad = swapping between Save slots (as you may want different save games)
Hope this makes sense. Let me know if not

[sirhenrythe5th]

just brainstorming: could you possibly write a syntax like "sudo run pacman.zip %lr-fbneo% +load save_state=2" (just guessing, i know this is not a real runable syntax / the right commands!) and name that "Pacman -> final Level" to have an entry in the ES-Gamelist where you in fact jump to the final level by starting this one?

[sleve_mcdichael]

You mean you want it to auto-load to the saved state, without activating a "load state" hotkey, right? I guess probably this, then:

# Automatically saves a savestate at the end of RetroArch's lifetime.
# The path is $SRAM_PATH.auto.
# RetroArch will automatically load any savestate with this path on startup if savestate_auto_load is set.
# savestate_auto_save = false
# savestate_auto_load = true

You'll need to ensure that savestate_auto_load is set "true" and that the .auto file exists (it's not entirely clear from the comment, but I would try something like ~/RetroPie/roms/snes/Super Mario World (USA).srm.auto and see if that works.

[sirhenrythe5th]

@sleve_mcdichael in this great Museum you have the choice of several points to jump in.
The latest savepoint is just one.
So how can we get to the point of choosing between multiple savepoints to jump in without using hotkeys?
I would try to write commandlines as stated above and add them to the gamelist.

[RetroPieRoss]

@sleve_mcdichael This is the solution, I think. But it needs to be mapped to (initially a keyboard key, ideally), an input linked to hotkey & B which I believe would then set it back to the save state?

How would the keyboard mapping work per ROM?

[RetroPieRoss]

@sirhenrythe5th Good point. I couldn't remember if you could jump to different points per system, or whether you had to move to a different system? But yeah, you're probably right regarding commandline usage. That would be ideal.

[sleve_mcdichael]

@sirhenrythe5th said in Jump to saved state:

@sleve_mcdichael in this great Museum you have the choice of several points to jump in.
The latest savepoint is just one.
So how can we get to the point of choosing between multiple savepoints to jump in without using hotkeys?
I would try to write commandlines as stated above and add them to the gamelist.

You could use a bash script to copy the desired save state file to the required $SRAM_PATH.auto filename before launching with the savestate_auto_load setting enabled.