Topic: Is there a site to download an entire library of useful save states?

[JonLeung]

If not, there's a million-dollar web site idea, you're welcome.

I know I can find individual save files and save states by Googling them, but I've yet to find anything super convenient for mass amounts of saves.

I am hoping there is (or could be) a site where people contribute all the most useful save states for games for various retrogaming platforms.  Like a collection, repository, whatever you want to call it.

Let's say that I want save states at every Robot Master in every NES Mega Man game.  Or all the key story points in every Super NES JRPG or adventure game.

Perhaps I have various emulators, emulation devices and flash carts, and I would like to be able to queue up a moment from pretty much any game instantly for my own purposes.  As a YouTuber that talks about games, this would be very handy for getting particular footage!

Like how MAME ROM sets are constantly updated, it would be cool if there is something like a curated "NES save state set" that is constantly updated, easily downloaded via torrents, and the files in some raw common form that can easily be copied over or converted for use in various forms with little effort.

Does such a thing exist?  Could it?

[DarkWolf]

Decades ago the bigger emulation sites like Zophar, etc, I think had some libraries. But they were far from robust.

I've thought of this idea before, but you'd really need a strong community to drive it. Writing and testing all of the needed converters would take a large effort and require people who are at least somewhat familiar with the system and the target emulators. I personally could probably whip up something for Genesis, but then I'd have to research and learn any other system I wanted to support. So not a project to take on by myself.

Alternatively, you could just choose the most popular emulator to support for the various systems, but then you're limiting usefulness of the library.

Personally I consider it to be a loss on the effort/reward trade-off. I think it would be a lot of hard work for a small audience of people. I think most people who just want to see a section of a game without getting there themselves, would probably just go to YouTube. Hackers and resource extractors might find it useful, but honestly tools like Cheat Engine go a long way in speeding through a game when you need it. Or you just extract things from the data files/ROM, which doesn't require playing the game other than to maybe verify something. But once again, that's something that YouTube can provide unless the game is super obscure.

[Roxannatton]

Huge amounts of time and energy would have to be invested by someone with a basic understanding of the system and the intended emulators in order to write and test all of the necessary converters. If I wanted to back any other system, I'd have to study up on it, but I could definitely whip up something for Genesis.

[ReyVGM]

I've amassed a ton of save states across the decades, but honestly a lot of them need specific emulator versions and in the case of Visual Boy Advance, you even need the specific bios version used or else the state won't load.