(Save Game / Save State Backup Manager) for PC Games + Emulators in LaunchBox

[Eisa AlAwadhi]

Hello Jason Car, and Brad Cheyne! Was thinking of the most essential things LaunchBox should implement and this came as a top priority from my point of view.

A Game Save manager that syncs our save state and save games from emulators and normal PC Games to LaunchBox folder and organizes them for backup/ managing purposes.

It will also display the sync status (using icons?) that the sync is in progress, and another icon if the game have all their saves synced (based on date?).

Perhaps the saves can also have a thumbnail or a capture to show our latest progress when selecting the game.

I know it can be complicated due to PC Games having their saves stored in various different locations, though there are people who created lists which might be helpful.

This will also attract people who never thought of using LaunchBox and wanted to backup their save games using a simple solution, because backing up PC Game saves in a reliable manner is a headache for many.

(In Future) The saves can be synced to our accounts and we can immediately sync our saves of all PC Games + Emulators just by signing in into LaunchBox in another PC.

This is basically the idea, how creatively it gets implemented is up to you! PS: John Carr been enjoying your developer sessions, you're a great speaker!

Thanks! Kindest Regards, Eisa AlAwadhi~

[Brad Cheyne]

Others have brought this up before, but thank you for making a ticket about it.

So I don't want to say never, because of course it can all be done, however this would be an extremely difficult task. It's more difficult than even I had thought originally. Most emulators don't follow a standard, nor do most PC games, so there is no way for us to automatically do something like this. This entire process, except for the act of backing up and restoring, can't be automated. This would most likely be something that the user would have to plug in a lot of values for. Let's take RetroArch for example, they keep their save states in the System folder (which may not even be default) for me. There is a setting to keep the save states with the roms instead, and if the System folder isn't what's chosen for another user then there are those folders as well. So the thought of keeping backups is an extremely great idea but would be extremely hard to implement. I don't make my post to deny or discourage you, so please don't take it this way. Just know that if we were to tackle this is would be, to say the least, complicated.

[Robert Taylor]

This is absolutely essential. I can't tell you how many times I lost my saves to the void. This would make backups really easy.

[William Jones]

Here's an idea. We can make saves shareable just for Retroarch cores temporarily to test if this process can work. Since all Retroarch cores use .srm as the save file extension and .state for saveststes, we can backup and share save files and save states easily in Retroarch.

We could host the save files on the Launchbox DB. Users could download someone's 100% save file/savestate or back up their saves on the DB. All you'd need to do to make the game saves compatible in your Retroarch config is rename the downloaded save file or state exactly the same as the rom/iso name that you're using in Launchbox/Retroarch with the .srm or .state extensions and place the file in the appropriate save location for your Retroarch configuration.

[ALI ESSA]

Wouldn't sharing potentially hurt Retroachievements system which is also getting integrated into Retroachievements.

[William Jones]

I agree that Retro achievements would be a barrier. Personally speaking, I don't care about achievements but that's just me. Good point of consideration.

[Russell Mcgraw]

http://www.gamesave-manager.com/ For backing up mose pc windows game saves don't know of anything that will do it for emulators