MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: Which HiScore.dat should be used?

> > And what do you do when you upgrade to a new version of MAME and your old save
> states
> > don't work anymore?
>
> FWIW, the likelihood of that happening for any of the golden age games is pretty
> minimal; most of those are firmly locked down and have been for a while.

I think you're a little optimistic.

Modernizations often break states.

For example, the recent 'soundlatch device' stuff is going to break old states for anything with a soundlatch, because it's now saved as part of a device, rather than a generic core thing.

heck, it might even break *all* old states, because I think the generic core latches were saved even for games not using soundlatches, and MAME doesn't tolerate *any* extra data in the state.

i've said it before, but the system is too fragile, it needs to be a zip/7z file with the folder structure organized like the device hierarchy, if data is missing, warn, but still load, if excess data is present ignore extra data (and warn). That way even if a state breaks due to a rename of a device it could still potentially be loaded if it was manually unzipped and reconstructed with the correct names. You could also store a text file in there with the version it was created in, maybe even a screenshot (and add a viewer to the state loader)