MAMEDEV Forum

Well, I see there's some progress been made in savestates right now, so I think it may be a good time for a little discussion about this subject.
Right now, MAME supports savestates by machines, even in machines which uses different softwares (softwarelist or by fullpath).
But, of course, a savestate created using a software A is incompatible with the same machine using software B.
Isn't it a better idea to support the savestate by software in machines which have a softwarelist?
Is there any technical reason to keep the savestates by machine, and not by software?
Are there plans to change the way which these savestates are created/stored/loaded?

Shideravan wrote:Well, I see there's some progress been made in savestates right now, so I think it may be a good time for a little discussion about this subject.
Right now, MAME supports savestates by machines, even in machines which uses different softwares (softwarelist or by fullpath).
But, of course, a savestate created using a software A is incompatible with the same machine using software B.
Isn't it a better idea to support the savestate by software in machines which have a softwarelist?
Is there any technical reason to keep the savestates by machine, and not by software?
Are there plans to change the way which these savestates are created/stored/loaded?

The short answer is yes. Save states are a concern and it is something that will be working towards to allow individual softlist entries or other software the ability to save unique states. There are some capabilities already with use of -statename command which is set up much like the -snapname and allows you to change the folder/filename of a given game to match that which has been run (instead of something generic in the machine's setname folder).

If course, more discussion is happening here which, ironically, is also posted by you:
http://forums.bannister.org/ubbthreads. ... Post106338