TIC-80
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nesbox
libretro core should serialize entire TIC-80 state, not just persistent memory
Exactly what it says on the tin. Because the TIC-80 core only saves persistent memory, savestates are completely useless unless the game was designed with them in mind.
Agreed, but this is much easier said than done... since you have like 10 different runtimes that all have their own states, etc...
@nesbox Would you be willing to accept a patch for this that only dealt with a single runtime? If not I think this could simply be closed as "wont fix" since I don't think anyone is likely to step up and contribute this functionality for ALL our runtimes (if it's even possible). I think it would be weird if say "full save state" was only possible with say Lua, for example - since players of the games might not even know what runtime is being used...
Serializing the whole state would be awesome, but I'm unsure how we could actually implement it. I'd opt to closing this, as it's not even something that TIC-80 does by itself, let alone in the libretro core.
I will close this as wontfix, given that I understand it won't really be possible. The inciting incident for this was attempting to get TIC-80 support in Bizhawk, and the Bizhawk devs ultimately used techniques on their end to get complete savestate support working.
@MineRobber9000 I'd be very curious to know how that is even possible - unless the entire TIC-80 platform is virtualized... this might be possible to do with the WASM build (typically running in the browser) since you'd have access to the full state (the full TIC-80 system state - not just the game) - but I can't think of a way outside of that to do this easily.
They have something called waterbox which allows them to serialize and restore a program's entire state. It's obviously much more complicated than I can really understand, but it works, and that's the part that matters.