The crash killed my save state!

[Slybo]

Playing FF7 I made it to a large crater on disk 2 after climbing up a snowy mountain. As I was running down into the crater the program crashed and the screen went white. There was a brief message that I didn't get a good look at about the gfx driver or the gfx engine.
When I reloaded the emulator I was no longer able to load my save state and front the main program screen all the save state slots where grayed out. What could have happened?
I assumed the save states where kept as files in the "sstates" folder and would therefore not be effected if the program was to suddenly terminate.
(I did NOT use a save state immediately before the crash)

The good news is that I would periodically use traditional saves. Unfortunatly the last time I did was at the moment I switched from disk1 to disk2

eSPXe1.6.0
Windows Vista sp1
2gb RAM
Athlon 64 X2 (dual core) 2.8ghz

Plugin: Pete's OpenGL2 Driver 2.8
Author: Pete Bernert
Card vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
GFX card: GeForce 8600 GT/PCI/SSE2/3DNOW!

Resolution/Color:
- 1920x1080 Fullscreen - NO desktop changing
- Internal X resolution: 2
- Internal Y resolution: 2
- Keep psx aspect ratio: off
- No render-to-texture: Þ

y

- Filtering: 6
- Hi-Res textures: 2
- TexWin pixel shader: on
- VRam size: 0 MBytes

Framerate:
- FPS limitation: on
- Frame skipping: off
- FPS limit: 75.0

Compatibility:
- Offscreen drawing: 1
- Framebuffer effects: 2
- Framebuffer uploads: 1

Misc:
- Scanlines: off
- Mdec filter: on
- Screen filtering: on
- Shader effects: 5/4
- Flicker-fix border size: 0
- GF4/XP crash fix: off
- Game fixes: on [00000002]

[jonc2006]

this is why i tell people not to use save states as their primary save method. without a specific error message its hard to say what went wrong and why it affected your save state, its likely it just got corrupted, they have a nasty habit of doing that to some people, doesnt happen often but when it does it isnt pretty as you can see. aside from that, looking at your settings i would turn off hi res textures and turn down filtering to 0 or 4. also make sure epsxe is being run on only one of your cpu cores because multi-core cpus can cause performance issues with epsxe.

[Slybo]

Thanks. I didn't know save states where this potentially fragile/unreliable. Maybe it will one of the things fixed with the newly announced update *crosses fingers*

And thanks for the advice on my graphic settings.

[jonc2006]

and just so you know, when i said to disable hi res textures, i really just ment for ff7. with other games it should be fine, more or less. with ff7 the hi res texture setting is known to produce what has been dubbed the "green line glitch" by some users. and its not too pretty either. the texture filtering setting can *sometimes* get involved with this as well, so i usually recommend it to be set to 0 (which disables it altogether) or 4 for ff7. like i said before, other games should be ok with those settings enabled, but watch those two close if you ever encounter odd visual glitches involving colored lines in games with 2d or pre-rendered backgrounds.

[Slybo]

As a matter of fact I normally have the Hi-Res Textures set to "2xSAI" (Or as I like to call it, "Gods gift to 2d sprites")
I switched it to "2: Stretched" for FF7 as a remedy for the ugly green lines.
I suppose setting it to "1: None" would also remove them (just as long as "2xSai" was not selected)

[jonc2006]

yeah that would fix it too.

[angelus6]

ahh there might actually be a fix for this.

in each FF game, theres 2 lines of hex code that is known as "Checksum".
this checks for corrupted data in game files, such as saves.
if you use download the Epsx emulated Gameshark plugin and the editor for it and find out the checksum override code from someone who really knows their stuff, that save should be retrieveable by forcing the game to load any/all corrupted data.

problem is... theres around 400,000 lines of possible code per disc. so unless someone already has the checksum codeing posted somewhere, it aint gonna happen

[jonc2006]

which is why you dont want to gamble with save states, chances are you will be the one to come out short handed if something goes wrong. use memory card saves and only memory card saves as your primary method unless you like the idea of having to retrace your progress.

[Hard core Rikki]

Savestates and memorycards can conflict sometimes, so it's better to standardize on one of these

[calb]

Originally Posted by Slybo

Playing FF7 I made it to a large crater on disk 2 after climbing up a snowy mountain. As I was running down into the crater the program crashed and the screen went white. There was a brief message that I didn't get a good look at about the gfx driver or the gfx engine.
When I reloaded the emulator I was no longer able to load my save state and front the main program screen all the save state slots where grayed out. What could have happened?
I assumed the save states where kept as files in the "sstates" folder and would therefore not be effected if the program was to suddenly terminate.
(I did NOT use a save state immediately before the crash)

It is a really strange problem. Like you say epsxe saves the files in "sstates", it is called "PSX-ID.n", where it is PSX-ID is the ID of the psx game (you can see it exploring the psx cdrom files), and "n" is the number of savestate (000-004). The file is a gzip compressed archive. You can explore the folder and check out if the files are yet there.

The epsxe GUI autodetect savestates when you are running a game, using the game name, and it graved/ungraved the slots in the menu, anyway it is shown only when you have running a game. You can rotate the savestates slots during gameplay with the key F2.

A crash shouldn't delete the savestate files, a different problem is that a savestate is yet there, but after of loading the file, it crashes, or shows "opcode error". While the savestates saves almost every possible variable in epsxe, the problems are usually related to spu savestate data, very complex with games using spu-irqs (like ff9 or valkyrie profile), due to the ways used for sync core-spu.

You should check if your savestate files are in the sstates folder.

Carlos.

[Squall-Leonhart]

I believe that spu state issue may have caused a bug in other older states Calb,

When i try to load my FF8 disk 1, 2 and 3 states it crashes. it didn't on earlier beta's... but oh well, thats the trade off you make for better support and compatibility.

[angelus6]

hmm odd, i've never had any ff8 problems at all with save states. even when modding my face off with [pec]. (to have seifer/edea etc and squall in SeeD uniform)
mind you, i run ff games on 1.52 rather than 1.6

and ofc with all sound disabled. since FF music was god awefull after FF7

[Squall-Leonhart]

of course not, you don't have 1.7..... and if you must know, FF8's music won more awards and acclaim then ff7's....