PCSX: Pandora to PC

[Wax]

I've been trying to get my saves from PCSX rearmed into Retroarch but have had no luck. I can't get the save states to work at all, and the memory card files don't get loaded. I've tried using psxge and memcardrex to convert them and they don't work. This page says pcsx-card2.mcd is the second memory card slot, so I tried renaming my mcd file to that. It was not recognized. I'm using the same BIOS on both machines, that doesn't seem to affect anything.

Is there a way to get my Pandora PCSX memory card or save states to work on the PC version/retroarch core?

 

[levi]

Almost certainly, but it may be a little involved. Could you post a save from PCSX rearmed and one from retroarch, so I could look at the structure?

 

[Wax]

Ok, save examples are uploaded. I included both save states and memory card saves. The Retroarch saves were created with the PCSX ReARMed core, which I used hoping it would be straightforward to share my files straight across but it didn't quite pan out.

 

[levi]

Okay, I don't understand the difference between memcards and save states, but I'm not that familiar with the game so maybe I'm just inexperienced. Certainly it looks like the files in PCSX*/memcards bears the most similarity to Rertoarch/saves while in both cases the other files look to my eyes more or less like noise; perhaps they're compressed.

Certainly the file in PCSX*/sstates/BREATH* claimed to be gz compressed data. I uncompresed it and it turned into a 4.2MiB file with a lot of empty space in it. Perhaps this is the process memory for the emulator. I've had less success in guessing what the file in Retroarch/states is.

 

[lukey]

The savefiles work just fine with the standard PCSX.

 

[Autian]

the difference between memcards and save states

Memcards are usually physical cartridges where games saves are stored and usually require much less space than savestates. Savestates instead store the whole hardware state including RAM, thus allowing one to save the progress at any time without ever going to a game's save point (if there are any). So if one only uses savestates for saving game progress, a buggy game may accumulate its flaws over time, increasing the chance of crashes or other weird behaviour.

Edit: ignore me if I missed the point

 

[Wax]

Okay, I don't understand the difference between memcards and save states, but I'm not that familiar with the game so maybe I'm just inexperienced. Certainly it looks like the files in PCSX*/memcards bears the most similarity to Rertoarch/saves while in both cases the other files look to my eyes more or less like noise; perhaps they're compressed.

Not sure but I did find some more info about memory card formats online so I may play with conversion software a bit more.

Certainly the file in PCSX*/sstates/BREATH* claimed to be gz compressed data. I uncompresed it and it turned into a 4.2MiB file with a lot of empty space in it. Perhaps this is the process memory for the emulator. I've had less success in guessing what the file in Retroarch/states is.

This turned out to be the secret sauce. I used 7-zip on Windows to extract the compressed contents, renamed it to match Retroarch's naming scheme, and it worked without a problem. I was hoping it might also work with Duckstation too, but no dice. Not a big deal. I'll still have to test to see if it works going the other way but this is promising.

The savefiles work just fine with the standard PCSX.

Good to know but I would prefer to use Retroarch when I can since it provides a consistent way to access and configure emulators on a lot of different platforms. I wonder what's the difference is between vanilla PCSX and the Retroarch version that causes this discrepancy.

 

[Wax]

As a follow up on this, the .srm files used by Retroarch PCSX are apparently the same as .mcr files. I loaded the Pandora .mcd file with Memcardrex and saved it as a .mcr file, then changed the extension to .srm and it loaded up fine. Idk why the standalone and Retroarch versions of PCSX use different memory card formats, that's kinda weird, but if anyone else wants to bounce their saves between their Pandora and their PC, hopefully this helps.