Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

First off, I know savestates aren't fully stable yet. I thought I'd start this to discuss patterns to the problem, ways around it, etc.

I'm playing Symphonia: Dawn of the New World at the moment and I noticed something funny last night. I made four savestates as usual (just to be safe) and it finally happened - all of them were broken. I decided to play around with some settings to see if it helped, and upon switching from D3D9 to D3D11 and putting everything on safe and enhancement-free, the savestates loaded fine! So I then proceeded to make new states, went back to "pretty mode" D3D9 and the new states loaded properly.

I've also been playing around with the idea that maybe this is related to framerate - but I don't know. I also have no idea how much testing's already been done on this and if there's a general consensus on what it's about and plans for implementing a fix, so if somebody could enlighten me on that, that'd be appreciated.

You migth also want to use native saves, because their defectiveness could be related if they're made right after each others.

Yeah, there's a bit of randomness with the save states. I usually try to load the save states a few times before giving up on them. Also loading the states in a different order sometimes works too. For example, I might load state 3 followed by state 1 to get it to work when loading state 2 followed by state 1 won't.

Yes, I'm using native saves as often as I can - but I'm so used to states when emulating, I find it difficult to get rid of the habit.

And yes, I've found that too - loading a comparatively "healthy" state first and then jumping to a less stable one seems to work rather often, but loading unstable states one after the other just seems to freeze all of them. I also found that certain graphical elements seem to impact the states' stability, as they refused to work altogether (even after 25+ attempts at saving and loading) when there was a heavy fog effect on screen (as you enter the Iselia Human Ranch in Symphonia 2). The fog brought my framerate down from its otherwise stable 50 FPS, so I still think it's framerate-related somehow.