Saved Games go missing after clean exit…

[jaredhaxton]

Hello everyone! I am using the built in functionality on the xbox 360 controller to cleanly exit out of games. I saved a game of earthbound, held select and pressed start, and it saved the game for the next time I played. I continued where I left off, played a couple hours, saved it in game again, held select, pressed start, it exited cleanly (to my knowledge), unplugged the device for the day and when I came back to it… there was no saved game at all… not even the original…

I can see in the file system that there is a .srm file last updated about the time I did my last save… It shows the file size of it as ‘0’. What am I missing here? Thank you for your help!!! :)

Ver: 3.0
Model: B+
USB Xbox 360 controller
File: /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/snes

[DavidBowman]

I’m not sure about the zero file size. Maybe it’s zero kilobytes because it’s less than a single kilobyte?

It might be a file permissions issue since this just happened to me with Mario Kart 64 (right after I got the final gold cup on the last 150cc circuit too!). I don’t know exactly how it happened (user error somewhere, I’m sure), but changing the file ownership back to the pi user fixed it.

Drop down to a terminal (F4, or ssh in) and change directory to your where your ROM and .SRM file are located, then do:

sudo chown pi [name of game].*

Let us know if that solves it.

[jaredhaxton]

Thank you for your response! Here is my progress on things as I have been tinkering…

1. pi was the owner of the save files that were created. But for whatever reason, it appeared that I didn’t have write access to the file I just created. I made a folder called /home/pi/RetroPie/save and set the Retroarch file to save to that location for .state and .srm.

It would save the first time and then wouldn’t allow me to save another state over it. After changing the permissions on the specific file to 777, I was able to keep writing over it. But every time I make a new state file for a game, I have to change the permissions on the state file to 777 so I can run it and overwrite it. What might be the problem there? I can’t execute the files I create?

2. When I was trying to make my “save” folder from the terminal, it told me that I was out of space (32gb SD card) and I couldn’t make another folder. I deleted a psx rom and then I could make it. After that I still had to go through the steps in number 1 above to get it working. I have since expanded the filesystem from the raspi-config. But I don’t know if I am missing another step… Does this sound like it is properly set up?

Thank you so much for your reply! Talk to you soon!

[DavidBowman]

There’s an option in the RetroPie setup to give ownership of all of the ROM folders back to the pi user. Perhaps the folders themselves don’t have the proper permissions / ownership? I’m only guessing since I honestly don’t know for sure.

Maybe run a file system check on the SD card if possible?

Barring that, it might just be easier to backup all of your save files, ROMs, etc. to a safe location and reinstall everything (I know this isn’t anyone’s favorite exercise, but SD cards are screwy sometimes and starting clean does have its advantages).

Good luck! Maybe someone more knowledgeable than I can chime in.

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