Subscribe via RSS
18Oct/160

Take The A-Train (MSX) – Don’t trust the save option!

Here I was, building my little railway... saving fastidiously along the way to make sure I had a restore point to return to. There is only room for one 'save' in the game (stored in SRAM), and so I knew that each time I saved I overwrote the previous save.

atrain-track-before-save atrain-track-before-save-2 atrain-track-before-saving

Upon closing and restarting the emulator, I tried to load my save-game and got the following:

atrain-track-load

Hah... the map has loaded with no tracks... the trains then try to move and just crash! I wonder if this is a Japanese Cartridge thing?

Does saving work on fMSX?

I downloaded fMSX and tried the same thing. Firstly, it was not as easy to get the game running! Make sure you set the cartridge type to: ASCII 16kB Mapper. Once running, I ran into the same issue:

a-train-before-save a-train-after-save atrain-save-bork

That last shot is even better... it happened after I adjusted further settings... proves that this is a save/load from SRAM issue... maybe endian or somesuch?

Your best bet?

Use the save state functionality built-in to each of the emulators. I successfully saved and loaded an STA file into BlueMSX. They'll also give you an unlimited number of saves, rather than just overwriting the same save in SRAM each time.