Savestate/file issue in combination with physical disc playback

DidiZing

Happy to join the Retropie boards!

I'm using RP4.6 on a few installations, both with Pi3B and Pi4 boards. Recently I've been toying with the pyhsical disc playback that's integrated since earlier this year. It was a pleasant surprise to see this working so flawlessly, when other Retroarch implementations still have a hard time providing the same functionality on many platforms.

Anyway, when playing physical discs directly from a attached disc drive, the savefile/savestate folder has to be adjusted, otherwise RA hangs while trying to create savestates. But that's easily done.

Unfortunately RP (or RA if you like) uses the same file name for any disc based game, which means that while SRAM and states do work, they get overwritten once a new disc is inserted and used. File names used are drive0.*. This basically gives you a combined SRAM across all games for one system (like on original hardware), but the file is obviously destroyed once you switch between systems (e.g. run a TG16 disc first and then a Sega CD disc afterwards).

I was wondering if there's any known workaround for this?

And advice would be highly appreciated! Thanks, Didi

mitu

@DidiZing said in Savestate/file issue in combination with physical disc playback:

I was wondering if there's any known workaround for this?

I'm not sure how you launch the cdrom (from EmulationStation), but you may be able to work-around by defining a savestate folder per-system (see https://retropie.org.uk/docs/RetroArch-Configuration/#config-hierarchy), instead of a global folder in the (global) retroarch.cfg.

The issue seems like a RetroArch limitation - the content name is not changed based on disc content (label) when loading the disc, so any other paths that depend on the content name (savefile/save states/memory card) will get the same name.

DidiZing

Thanks for the reply!

You can launch discs for supported cores by starting any rom for the system in question first (which avoids having you to load up a core first before launching a disc) and then selecting "load disc" from the retroarch menu.

You're right, defining a per-system folder for the savefiles is a good idea, but it doesn't help with the save states, which is indeed a retroarch problem.