autosave??

[Henrik]

I don't know, it's not THAT crazy. Some emulators can even take a snapshot every second, then if Mario falls into a pit you can just press backspace a few times and warp back.

On a NES though, a savestate is about 2kb so you can have infinite amounts of them in RAM. On the PSP, even a compressed savestate is often 15-20 MB so we can't keep that many in RAM. On PCs though you could keep quite a few though...

The other issue with the bigger savestates is that it takes time to do the snapshot. You only have a few milliseconds to do it, otherwise you will notices a stutter every time the emu takes a snapshot. On fast PCs it may be possible to do it fast enough (we'll have to avoid clearing caches the way we do now though somehow), will be very hard on mobile though.

An alternative autosave model is to simply have a single savestate in RAM that you save to every minute or so, and write it to disk/permanent memory on a background thread. This approach might even be possible to do nicely on mobiles, but loading a savestate other than the very last one will be slower.

Of course there are even more possibilities.