Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums - Setting up saves on external drive

Hi everyone, brand new to emulating games here, and absolutely loving Dolphin. So excited to be able to replay the games I grew up with, and catch up some others I missed out on back in the day.

I bought a USB-3 external hard drive which I'm trying to turn into an all-consoles emulator box, with all the ROMs and ISOs stored along with the installers for the emulators themselves, so I can play on both my laptop and my desktop, and hopefully any computer I upgrade to in the future.

However, I noticed straight away after setting up the "memory cards" that my game saves were being stored to the C drives on my computers, so (obviously) the progress I make playing on my desktop isn't accessible when I play on my laptop. My dream setup is to have the memory cards save to and load from my external drive, but I haven't come across a solution I trust myself to execute... I'm not the most tech-savvy person, I know enough to get by and to follow and understand instructions.

What's the simplest way to do this? I got twenty smilies right here for whoever provides the most noob-friendly solution.

Thanks! Big Grin

Wouldn't using the cloud be easier?

(01-22-2018, 10:54 PM)MEKPOP Wrote: [ -> ]Hi everyone, brand new to emulating games here, and absolutely loving Dolphin. So excited to be able to replay the games I grew up with, and catch up some others I missed out on back in the day.

I bought a USB-3 external hard drive which I'm trying to turn into an all-consoles emulator box, with all the ROMs and ISOs stored along with the installers for the emulators themselves, so I can play on both my laptop and my desktop, and hopefully any computer I upgrade to in the future.

However, I noticed straight away after setting up the "memory cards" that my game saves were being stored to the C drives on my computers, so (obviously) the progress I make playing on my desktop isn't accessible when I play on my laptop. My dream setup is to have the memory cards save to and load from my external drive, but I haven't come across a solution I trust myself to execute... I'm not the most tech-savvy person, I know enough to get by and to follow and understand instructions.

What's the simplest way to do this? I got twenty smilies right here for whoever provides the most noob-friendly solution.

Thanks!

Extract Dolphin to the external drive and create an empty text file using notepad and save it as portable.txt in the same folder as dolphin.exe. This will create the User folder inside Dolphin and allows you to save the files there. Another thing you can do is just change where the files get saved in the options menu of Dolphin although I really recommend the former, I have this working without any glitch and hitch on 4 computers.

Quote:ExtremeDude2
Wouldn't using the cloud be easier?

What if there is no internet?

(01-23-2018, 12:03 AM)mstreurman Wrote: [ -> ]What if there is no internet?

Then what are you doing with your life? Tongue

(01-23-2018, 12:46 AM)ExtremeDude2 Wrote: [ -> ]Then what are you doing with your life?

Living in a place where internet is not commonplace? Too expensive? Travelling?

(01-23-2018, 12:03 AM)mstreurman Wrote: [ -> ]Extract Dolphin to the external drive and create an empty text file using notepad and save it as portable.txt in the same folder as dolphin.exe. This will create the User folder inside Dolphin and allows you to save the files there. Another thing you can do is just change where the files get saved in the options menu of Dolphin although I really recommend the former, I have this working without any glitch and hitch on 4 computers.

Amazing reply, thank you. Here's 10 smilies just for that Big Grin

One little thing though - by "extract Dolphin to the external drive" what do you mean?
Download and install it to run from the external drive? Move all the current program files from my C drive to the external drive?

I believe you can run dolphin from an external hdd and create a file called portable.txt and it should save everything on it.

(01-23-2018, 06:14 AM)MEKPOP Wrote: [ -> ]Amazing reply, thank you. Here's 10 smilies just for that
One little thing though - by "extract Dolphin to the external drive" what do you mean?
Download and install it to run from the external drive? Move all the current program files from my C drive to the external drive?

Download the latest development build and indeed extract "install" it on the external drive.