There's a solution everybody keeps overlooking, and it's so easy it's actually common sense.
STOP PLAYING GAMES WITHOUT USING MEMORY CARD SAVES!
Programmers write games with the knowledge that games are saved to memory cards. Not to mention they're not always all that careful about how things are handled in the code. So when you keep playing without using memory card saves and only using save states, you're technically playing the game without ever stopping. This causes the tiny little problems to go from not being noticeable, to potentially freezing your game. Saving to memory cards and loading from them helps to wipe out most of these problems because only specific, important variables get saved to a memory card file. So using memory card saves (which costs you... OMG!!! 128 KB OF HARD DRIVE SPACE PER MEMORY CARD!!!) is a great method of alleviating many of these problems, when used as a preventive measure.
I know emulation is great, and everybody loves their save states oh so much. But seriously? They can't save to a memory card every once in a while at least when they're done playing? Are they *always* so far from a save point of any kind when they have to stop playing? And they always have to stop playing *immediately*? Nobody *ever* has a few minutes to make it to a save point?
No emulator is going to be able to prevent most of these problems. Hell, it happens on the *real* hardware if you play without ever using memory card saves. Not quite as much of course, but common enough to be well-known.
I'm sorry if I seem a bit irritated. But it's really hard to see so many people completely ignore people saying and writing all over the place that using memory cards prevents so many problems on emulators, and then they come crying and begging for help on a problem that *they* caused, and now can't be fixed because they had decided that all of us must be wrong about memory cards and they'll do what they want to do anyway. I keep thinking that eventually, most people will catch on to this problem that's been ongoing and thoroughly discussed for years. But instead, I end up being either irritated and/or amazed at how the numbers seem to be going up instead of down.
Last edited by Gamesoul Master; June 25th, 2009 at 16:18..