Gaming Savestating

[osm70]

HI,
I want to play PC games with savestates.
(How) Can I use Virtual PC or Virtual Box to do it?

 

[FAST6191]

It is probably far easier to go in for conventional memory editing cheats even with most PC programming languages dynamically allocating memory. Likewise if you want memory dumps to try editing a la savestate hacking then those are easy to get on a per program basis as well. There are loads of memory viewing, dumping and editing programs some of which can even restore process level memory; Rydian lists a bunch and some basics http://gbatemp.net/topic/326547-basic-fileprogram-hacking-information/ and many of the additional tools for console/emulator cheat making will do regular programs as it is functionally no different to say nothing of hex editors also having such functionality.

Still virtual box has a snapshot feature and http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html#snapshots has more, I am not quite sure it will be able to approximate emulator savestates but definitely worth a punt. This said Even with a modern machine and AMD-V/VT-x turned on and with paravirtualization working you are probably not going to get far with modern games and even things in the just before directX 9.0c range.

If you are after a game that erases old savestates then it might be worth something like http://www.sandboxie.com/ instead.

 

[osm70]

Well I dont really care about savestate edits, I just want save-and-load or rewind or something to undo mistake.

 

[Rydian]

I've looked into that as well, and there's not really anything to do it. The way emulators do it is not by changing the state of the game, but of the entire system, which would include the OS.

Your best bet is a VM with a state feature, like Microsoft Virtual PC or VMware. Yes, their state feature takes like 5-15 minutes to load and save, so it's not really usable for gaming like in emulators.

The best bet for getting past a part is a combination of speedhacks and memory editing. The guide doesn't cover speedhacks but in Cheat Engine you just check the speedhack box and then adjust the slider to change the game speed.