@mitu thanks for your help. The amendments to the CFG file worked.

Hi Mitu,
Sorry about not posting that information, must've missed that post. I started collecting the data, but while I was running through it I decided to run the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install alsa-utils

After that my save states worked normally even with auto-login enabled. When I originally updated the device was when the save states stopped working, but I guess now that has been figured out :)