NES Save State feature plausible?

[hscorpio]

Hi all. Is anyone aware if someone is working on save states for NES? If so, I want to throw money their way
If I had this feature I could retire my Pi entirely. NES is such a great console but so many older games don't have any save features (I'm looking at you Blaster Master) or brutal password systems (hello Faxanadu, you managed to create a password system even more tedious than Metroid)

I know this is not an easy task, I'm just curious since Game Boy Advance and most recently Game Boy have it, I am hoping it's plausible on NES too. Thanks!

[darcagn]

+1 for hoping this feature comes available.

I usually play on a real NES with Everdrive-N8 which has save states, but I'm a huge fan of NES music, and cranking the music to my desired levels makes background noise intolerable. The NES core on MiSTer having digital audio solves that problem, but NES can be a challenge to pick up and play without savestates.

[Newsdee]

Nobody is working in yet. It will need quite a bit if rework, and will probably happen one day, but for now I'd suggest using cheats / GG codes like back in the day.

[FPGAzumSpass]

It will come one day, most likely this year.
Maybe not for all rare mappers and all homebrew games, but all common games should be possible.

[SegaSnatcher]

Rysha said that NES core is setup in a way that could make save states possible. The problem is with the mappers taken into account it will be a lot of work.

[Newsdee]

Aren't the Everdrive N8 save states also limited to some mappers, though?

[darcagn]

Aren't the Everdrive N8 save states also limited to some mappers, though?

This was true until the 23.12.2019 update which included savestate support for all mappers the EDN8 supports running.

[12characters]

Besides cheats, there are now rom hacks adding SRAM save available for some games, including the aforementioned Faxanadu and Metroid. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be any for Rygar, which would have benefited from a save feature.

[hscorpio]

Yea, I've gotten a few save patches, it's a good solution when it exists.

Honestly, even a suspend or hibernate feature would be cool. It's less I need save states to cheese my way through games and more a way to play in multiple sittings without having to leave the system on / having an easy way to resume where left off. But that is still a good alternative in the meantime