Savestates

[HerrNove]

What's the community opinion about using savestates, like those provided by Dosbox-X, instead of the integrated rewind function?

I have never tried them since I play on vanilla DOSBox, but I would like to try as it seems to me that 50% of my playtime is spent pushing the rewind button. With savestates I would be able to focus on the interesting parts: driving, taking notes, studying the map, etc.

But, I think this should be first explicitly approved, at least informally, as it would give an advantage to those willing to use a specific emulator, wrt those playing on real hardware or other platforms.

Thoughts?

[Duplode]

I lean against it, precisely for the sake of software parity with those on real hardware or emulators lacking that feature. That's specially considering that vanilla DOSBox (the one most people know and use) doesn't have save states, and DOSBox Staging (which we should make the recommended default IMO) doesn't either. (That said, I won't be horrified if the consensus turns out to disagree with me.)

P.S.: The worst part of the conventional RH workflow for me is accidentally choosing "Re-start driving" instead of "Continue driving". Aaaaargh!!

P.P.S.: Sharing tips and advice about the RH workflow could make for an interesting conversation. (Mine are: pick a systematic replay naming scheme that works for you, and save lots of partial replays!)

[Matei]

https://www.emu-france.com/emulateurs/10-ordinateurs/173-sinclair-zx-spectrum/1232-spectrum/

Une nouvelle version d'un des plus vieille émulateur Sinclair Spectrum disponible, crée par Pedro Gimeno. Il ne supporte que le Spectrum 48.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/bars3d/

This is my program and I included the emulator in the archive. From file REAME.txt, line 119:

Besides tape images, this emulator can also load and save snapshot images, but they are in a different format compared to the one used by most emulators and mentioned above, so I made 2 programs for converting these files, i.e. sna2sp.c and sp2sna.c, which are in zxbars/tools. More information is in README.txt, also there. A snapshot can be saved from the emulator by pressing F2. No confirmation will be shown, but the file will appear in the directory as SNAP****.SP. To load a snapshot, start the emulator by typing:

spec386 /sp=SNAP0001.SP

[dreadnaut]

I suppose it's an unwritten rule (which mean maybe we should write it down) that ZakStunts allows (almost) anything that can be done within the game.

There's a number of external techniques that are considered cheating, e.g., modifying car dashboard to see details the car doesn't normally show, messing with the executable to highlight tile boundaries, etc. On the other hand, they would only help in niche cases: folks driving at that level already enjoy the challenge more than winning.