Here is the current load down on in game saves, config files,custom settings, working options and so forth.
- For both the current SNES and GBA cores, save games will be stored to and loaded from the current rom directory you selected. The only thing you have to do is to launch the emulator, and select a rom to load. For the save file to be written, press + and - at the same time, click B, and select quit retroarch.
The reason, why this is a new, highly celebrated - thing, is that the current developers had a hard time "accessing" the sdcard in the current builds, before you are specifying a path, once the emulator has loaded (by selecting the path to launch a rom from). This also means, that loading a RA config currently does not work, because RA has to be loaded, before you can specify a path on the sdcard - and so the dog bites its tail at this point.
That savegames now get created in the rom dir is a huge thing, because it means, that you dont have to manually set the save path after each and every launch, and just selecting your rom is enough to "specify" all paths needed - for basic operation.
The current SNES and GBA builds behave that way - others may as well.. I'm not going through every one of them and check - do it on your own, and if you plan on reporting, do it thoroughly. (Do "all" of them now save to the rom dir by default is the question at hand.)
- Apart from the very, very core option of loading and playing a game - and saving, most of the other "features" of retroarch currently dont work. Remember that those are not official releases, made with early development libraries - which are responsible for some of the still ongoing setbacks. Getting them to work "better" might require the entire development efforts put into them - redone, loosing all the progress made so far. We are not sure if people are working on that, or indeed if Retroarchs promises of creating an "official Switch release" are even being honored right now, or in the future.
The Switch - especially for newer (more demanding) retroarch cores is a hard system to develop for, because it is very 64 bit centric, and the usual libraries they used for hardware acceleration in the past, didn't work out of the box this time around. Dynarecs may actually have to be written from scratch - this takes dedication, and time. For the time being, promises were made, then they (RA) went dark on the communication front.
Speaking of communication.
Here is what still doesn't work:
- Build sharing, because someone asks "can I haz build?", "do you haz build for me?"
The problem is easily described as a "many to one fallacy". Think of it that way. You are King. You haz what all the peoples want. All the people wants to ask you if they can haz what yous got. You better develop a royal state with embassadors and different officalls fast to handle the queries. It even wouldnt hurt to layer in a hefty doze of corruption and a institutional threat of violence, to slow the proceedings down a little.
Now if you are King, and you have program to release, on your own, by your own volition, and on your own terms, this magically works, because now you are talking "one to many" so everyone hears what you have to say.
If you do nothing of the above, and let a few poor souls in your community handle all the research (what do the builds actually do, what changed?), documentation, public relations, support and "can you say what this thread reads, I'm not reading..." for you - you have the "Retroarch experience", and a bunch of frustrated archdragons out there, in no time.
Hope this makes it clear, why you never should ask for builds. If one person does it, its manageable. If 12 do it, it isn't. If 120 are doing it, you better burn that channel down - and start over.
Also - always fun to see that things havent changed... When I stated a few days before, that probably more builds currently use the rompath as the default savepath, without the need to define it separately - I also asked others to look into it and confirm it. Nothing happened. A few two sentence statements, that could be interpreted either way with a *lol* on the end. Thats the quality community output you can count on these days. Your "user generated content".
Also, and take this to heart, reading stuff is NOT OPTIONAL, for a working community.