I'm stumped by my ingame saves disappearing for no apparent reasons. Strap in, 'cause it's a bit of a long story:
Today, I went back to a hard (ingame) save I had made several months ago, when Dolphin was less up-to-date. The game is FF: Crystal Chronicles. (No GBA Link cables are involved, only single player GC controller.) Let's call the save I loaded at the start of my play session S1. It's on Memory Card A.
I play for a bit, occasionally saving over S1. At the end of my session, I go to save again, and find that Save 1 is empty. Looking at the Memory card manager, the save file is still there. The memory card's file show "Last modified" as the last time I did save over S1. So the save is still there but the game isn't showing it to me.
I save over the empty slot with my post-play-session file. Looking at the Memcard manager, that created a second FFCC save on Memory Card A. I'll call it S2. At this point, I make a savestate just in case and close Dolphin.
I boot Dolphin and load the game normally (no load states). It shows me S1. I go into the memcard manager and remove S1 so only S2 is left. Reboot, and it says there's no save file.
=> I can't get the game to show me S2 from a fresh boot.
I import S1 back onto Card A, load my savestate, and it shows me S2. I fiddle with menus to try and get the game to show me S1 so I can write over it. No luck, it only ever shows me S2.
=> Soft reboots keep showing me S2. Rebooting the emulator shows me S1.
Now, I could simply use savestates to keep playing normally from S2. But as soon as I download whatever new revision comes up, those will be lost and I don't want that. And I can't make ingame saves from S2 that I'll be able to load later.
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Any idea what's going on, and how I could keep going from the end of this play session? It'd be a bit disheartening for me to lose my progress, but more importantly, I wanna understand what could have caused this so it doesn't happen to me when I'm doing something more important.
Oh, and no codes were used nor did I change any settings during gameplay that I'm aware of. Frame skip was used several times though. I am using the latest Dolphin build.
Today, I went back to a hard (ingame) save I had made several months ago, when Dolphin was less up-to-date. The game is FF: Crystal Chronicles. (No GBA Link cables are involved, only single player GC controller.) Let's call the save I loaded at the start of my play session S1. It's on Memory Card A.
I play for a bit, occasionally saving over S1. At the end of my session, I go to save again, and find that Save 1 is empty. Looking at the Memory card manager, the save file is still there. The memory card's file show "Last modified" as the last time I did save over S1. So the save is still there but the game isn't showing it to me.
I save over the empty slot with my post-play-session file. Looking at the Memcard manager, that created a second FFCC save on Memory Card A. I'll call it S2. At this point, I make a savestate just in case and close Dolphin.
I boot Dolphin and load the game normally (no load states). It shows me S1. I go into the memcard manager and remove S1 so only S2 is left. Reboot, and it says there's no save file.
=> I can't get the game to show me S2 from a fresh boot.
I import S1 back onto Card A, load my savestate, and it shows me S2. I fiddle with menus to try and get the game to show me S1 so I can write over it. No luck, it only ever shows me S2.
=> Soft reboots keep showing me S2. Rebooting the emulator shows me S1.
Now, I could simply use savestates to keep playing normally from S2. But as soon as I download whatever new revision comes up, those will be lost and I don't want that. And I can't make ingame saves from S2 that I'll be able to load later.
---
Any idea what's going on, and how I could keep going from the end of this play session? It'd be a bit disheartening for me to lose my progress, but more importantly, I wanna understand what could have caused this so it doesn't happen to me when I'm doing something more important.
Oh, and no codes were used nor did I change any settings during gameplay that I'm aware of. Frame skip was used several times though. I am using the latest Dolphin build.