save state question

[TheDax]

A bit more goes into a savestate than just a copy of RAM like Wikipedia says. You'd also store the emulated CPU state(registers, program counter/instruction pointer, etc.) and the input state; basically the status of the entire console itself. Everything the emulator does is stored somewhere in memory, so it's just a matter of writing it out to a file, and then loading from it at a later point once the user directs the program to do so. Of course, that doesn't include extra things like different versions of save states/emulators, etc.. For that you'd likely write a header to the save state followed by the raw state data.