I dont understand save games in dolphin

[do7phin]

Hello,

I am new to dolphin. I have read the FAQ and several posts and I still dont understand how save games work.

I know that I can press F1-F12 to load and shift + F1-12 to save. Thats fine. I dont know where those files are but it certainly works. I dont know if the autoupdate feature will make it unaccessible one day.

Now with the memory card. I was using Super Mario sunshing and saved the game in the memory card slot. Then I played Zelda and tried to save it again resulting in a corrupted file and losing everything... I don't know how should I configure everything.

[AnyOldName3]

The 'saves' you're using with F1 and friends are savestates. These don't save the game specifically, just what the emulator was doing, and that happens to include the game. They're intended for things like cheating when there's a difficult boss a long time after the last in-game save and stuff like that, not for general use, and there are quite a few issues that using savestates can cause.

The other kind of saves are in-game saves, and these are much more reliable, especially when you don't also try and use savestates. These work in the same way as they would on a real console, but with slight changes like potentially being able to have saves for more games in the emulator than you could on a real console without deleting some.

I'm guessing that what happened with your corrupted save issue was you encountered one of the problems that can happen if you mix and match savestates and real saves, and it killed your real save.

[do7phin]

I am fine with the save states.

But I don't know how could I config in-game saves. Because if I use in two different games the game tries to overwrite the other game save. I dont know what is wrong here or the correct config for in-game saves.

Thank you for answering. Yes, savestates with f1 are the easier but I know they will end up causing me problems.

[do7phin]

The 'saves' you're using with F1 and friends are savestates. These don't save the game specifically, just what the emulator was doing, and that happens to include the game. They're intended for things like cheating when there's a difficult boss a long time after the last in-game save and stuff like that, not for general use, and there are quite a few issues that using savestates can cause.

The other kind of saves are in-game saves, and these are much more reliable, especially when you don't also try and use savestates. These work in the same way as they would on a real console, but with slight changes like potentially being able to have saves for more games in the emulator than you could on a real console without deleting some.

I'm guessing that what happened with your corrupted save issue was you encountered one of the problems that can happen if you mix and match savestates and real saves, and it killed your real save.

[Craftyawesome]

A GCI folder will put each individual save as gci files. A memory card .sav is simply a memory card stored in its entirety. A .sav has all the limits of a real memory card. 16 MB max and 127 slots of data. If these are broken with a gci folder, dolphin will try to intelligently choose the most relevant saves. 

Savestates may trigger anti cheating measures in the game. Also, if your gc games are different regions, dolphin will use different folders/files for the saves.