Do game saves not write to file during the actual save?

lostless

IM on a Pi3 with retropie 4.1.14 using lr-MGBA 5.0

Ive been playing a GBA castlevania game and just lost about 2 hours of game play. Ive been saving along the way using save states and real saves. I just died and meant to load the previous save state but accidentally hit R and wrote over the save state. No big deal right? My last real save was just a few minutes ago, right? Well I just hit continue and it loaded up a save file from 2 hours ago, the last time I quit MGBA to emulation station. Anyone else have a similar issue?

lostless

I think I found the culprit. NO, RetroArch DOES NOT save the file until you exit retroarch. Bad design in case of power failure ;D. My problem was i use a mausberry switch and i just save stated and then turned off my pi. When i turned it back on, I just loaded up from my last save state, well the game had no idea I was saving along the way because it had the old srm file in memory. Whats even more scary is that save states don't actually save the state of the sram, so it was a ticking time bomb, nothing was being saved this whole time. ~~I saw an option in the RGUI to auto save the saver for an interval period, but it doesn't seem be doing anything. Anybody have any other ideas that would auto save the sram during game play?~~

lostless

The auto save does work. It only writes when it sees a change in Sram. I don't know why this isn't on by default?

Tyralyon

I just wanted to say thank you for this post! I agree that it's baffling that auto save isn't on by default.

SixSpeedDeath

@lostless To clarify: Whch Auto Save were you using?

I see an option for SaveRAM Autosave interval, but I do not see an option that saves only when it sees a change?

Did you change another setting, or just enable this to auto save every xxx seconds?

lostless

@sixspeeddeath basically the timer is just how often it checks for a change. But it will not write to disk unless there has been a change

dankcushions

@tyralyon said in Do game saves not write to file during the actual save?:

I just wanted to say thank you for this post! I agree that it's baffling that auto save isn't on by default.

because some games use the srm as effectively ram, writing to it many times - maybe as often as every frame. writes that often are a good way to kill an SD card, which is why it's not baffling this isn't on by default :)

SixSpeedDeath

@dankcushions I chose to go with a 60 second interval to avoid too many writes in a situation like that, but I'm hoping that is a long enough interval to give me the data security I'm looking for without compromising SD card life too much.

I just needed to know if the SaveRAM was the right item to enable.