Some questions about Action Replay/cheat codes...

[bernie6127]

1) I've heard in the past that you should not manually save the game when cheats are enabled or else this may cause glitches/crashing. Is it better to use save states instead, or is this just a rumour?

2) I recall seeing somewhere on this forum not to use codes with a specific set of characters due to those particular lines causing major problems in the game. I can't seem to find that thread again, does anyone know what I'm talking about?

3) Are longer codes more risky than shorter codes? Is it safer for the game to use a one line code rather than a four line code or is there no difference?

Sorry if these questions are dumb, I just don't wanna get halfway into a game to have it crashing/bugging out on me.

[TKSilver]

3) No, the only difference is what the code is doing, not the length of the code. That is assuming that the code is entered correctly and more lines means more places you could screwup typing in the code (but this was more of an issue on actual systems since entering codes was more annoying with on screen keyboards).

2) Master codes are not needed since they are really just a way for an action replay to work with the hardware (gamecube/wii) and Dolphin works differently.

1) This is the hard question. Cheat codes can change quite a lot so there is no perfect answer for is it safe to do a hard save (in game save) while a code is active. That being said save states are worse since a hard save only saves information the game is programed to save (character location, data values, inventory, win/loss records, ect.) while savestates dump all of the emulators memory into a savestate so it can resume at that exact point (gross oversimplification). So if you hard save with a widescreen cheat code in place the game won't save that and if you start up the game with put the code it should go back to how it was even after you load that save..... a save state though can cause issues since the values in memory are edited to work create the widescreen cheat so if you load the state that has the cheat enabled but now it is off maybe nothing happens maybe something breaks a bit (or a lot). That being said if a cheat screws something up and you do any kind of sace there is a chance for issues to exist after you load the game. For a hard save it probably won't happen unless it screwed up something the hard save saves/loads. For a save state it safes everything that is active to reload from that spot so odds are it will save what ever the code screwed up.

If you want to guarantee (as far as any emulator can guarantee a game won't have issues...) a game won't crash because of cheat codes then don't use cheat codes. But really unless the cheat system in Dolphin makes codes inherently less stable then on physical hardware the odds of something going wrong should be simular to just using one of these cheat systems on physical hardware. I use cheat codes on emulators (used to on the consoles I emulate as well) all the time and I have messed up a game or 2 but no more often then any cheat or exploit usually does.