Homebrew Question Is it possible to make saves read-only?

[PT333]

A lot of games will save your exact position and progress in the level if you quit to main menu, but when you die, it will spawn you at last checkpoint, erasing whole progress in the area. I was wondering about quitting the game in desired location and setting the savefile read-only by Checkpoint or Edizon. If you die then, system won't be able to overwrite your savefile to previous checkpoint and will spawn in your custom place with all your progress being intact. Is this possible?

 

[der:Tom]

I dunno about read only, but you could backup your save with checkpoint, copy it to a seperate folder name it so you know which save stat it is, and if you die you could easily restore your save.

 

[Retrojunkies]

arent normally autosaves also your latest checkpoint which you revert to.

making a save read only is stupid, if you progress to the next level, how on earth are you going to save your data, then if you die youll just revert back to your read only save file.

makes no sense at all, as above said, (tho ive not found a game that sends me all the way back to the start of a level after hitting an auto save/checkpoint) is to use checkpoint and back up your save.

 

[FAST6191]

I understand the thought process (who hasn't made a save, savestate or noted a passcode down before playing a section a few times/doing the pass the controller bit) but that is probably the wrong way of setting about it in terms of what most hacks do, and might have implications in the game as well as it is likely doing things you did not intend to do (dying is extremely likely to be a different process/section of code to loading back in following putting it down, while possible to change behaviours at that point you might as well just hack it to behave like you want rather than dodging the delete on launch "hibernation" style save which some devs offer).

In the case of the Switch I was reading a thread earlier about people using FTP to grab screenshots and I would do something similar but with the save. Duplicate it in a folder such that the game does not think to touch it. Restore at will. Load from save again (whether that means restarting the whole game I don't know and might change by game).
For a slightly more exotic hack you could possibly force the game to load from one save but save to another (depending upon how the switch firmware handles saves this might be easier said than done), and then you overwrite if your progress is such that you care for it.

 

[Retrojunkies]

I understand the thought process (who hasn't made a save, savestate or noted a passcode down before playing a section a few times/doing the pass the controller bit) but that is probably the wrong way of setting about it in terms of what most hacks do, and might have implications in the game as well as it is likely doing things you did not intend to do (dying is extremely likely to be a different process/section of code to loading back in following putting it down, while possible to change behaviours at that point you might as well just hack it to behave like you want rather than dodging the delete on launch "hibernation" style save which some devs offer).

In the case of the Switch I was reading a thread earlier about people using FTP to grab screenshots and I would do something similar but with the save. Duplicate it in a folder such that the game does not think to touch it. Restore at will. Load from save again (whether that means restarting the whole game I don't know and might change by game).
For a slightly more exotic hack you could possibly force the game to load from one save but save to another (depending upon how the switch firmware handles saves this might be easier said than done), and then you overwrite if your progress is such that you care for it.

that can be done with checkpoint, you can make as many backups as you like and name them, say save lvl1, lvl2 etc.

and at any point restore them, but in order for the game to pick up the change youll likely have to quit back to the main menu for it to do a fresh load and pick up the new save.

some games also cant be backed up while its running.

i think the best solution (which likely isnt possible with the switch) is like when you find pc trainers that let you create a dump/restore, so you can say press F5 to dump your current position then F6 to return back to that point.

 

[FAST6191]

that can be done with checkpoint, you can make as many backups as you like and name them, say save lvl1, lvl2 etc.

and at any point restore them, but in order for the game to pick up the change youll likely have to quit back to the main menu for it to do a fresh load and pick up the new save.

some games also cant be backed up while its running.

i think the best solution (which likely isnt possible with the switch) is like when you find pc trainers that let you create a dump/restore, so you can say press F5 to dump your current position then F6 to return back to that point.

That just sounds like savestates, which I can see happening for the Switch (it does keep the game software in its own little box, and that makes things far easier here). That said the best solution if a game like this was encountered is probably just to remove the "delete hibernation save" part of loading it, and possibly tweak it so death causes that to reload rather than do its normal checkpoint routine.

I don't know when the first particular example of this style of save might have been (probably one of the roguelikes) but it got somewhat popular during the later years of the GBA (stuff like Final Fantasy adding it as a nod to the fact they were running on portable devices) and people were devising workarounds there.

As far as either locks or lacks of manifested saves when running then that is usually sorted easily enough.