Game saves and backups

RetroXR keeps two different kinds of save, and it is worth knowing which one you are looking at.

• Battery saves — the in-game saves a cartridge kept on its own chip. These belong to the game.
• Memory cards — an object you slot into the console, for the systems that used them. See the PlayStation page.

Finding a game’s saves

Open SPAWN → Cartridges, find the game, and press the list icon on its row.

① Saves — every save that exists for this game.

② Achievements — its RetroAchievements, which you can browse here without launching the game.

If you have not played it yet, this page says so rather than showing an empty list.

Choosing which save a cartridge uses

A game can have more than one save, and the cartridge decides which one it is using. That is why the page above tells you to spawn the cartridge first.

Point at a spawned cartridge and press the menu button to get its own panel. From there you can pick an existing save, or start a fresh one.

Two saves, one game

This is how you keep a second playthrough without losing the first — a new blank save rather than overwriting. The cartridge remembers which one it is bound to.

Deleting a save

Deleting is armed on the first press and done on the second, so a stray click cannot wipe a playthrough.

Caution

A save cannot be deleted while the console holding that game is switched on. Power the machine down first. Memory cards follow the same rule.

Where saves live on disk

Battery saves are written into the libretro/save/ folder — see the libretro folder.

You can copy them out for safekeeping, but on a Quest do not copy them back in from a PC: files pushed from a computer land owned by the shell rather than the app, and RetroXR can no longer write to them. A save file it cannot update looks exactly like a save that was wiped.

Backing up to RomM

If you run a RomM server, it can hold your saves as well as your games — which is the answer to the paragraph above, because it does not involve copying files onto the headset by hand at all.

1. Connect RomM if you have not already.

2. Saves sync back to the server as you play.

3. A game you played in the headset carries on where you left off elsewhere, and a save made elsewhere is there when you pick the headset up.

PlayStation memory cards are included — a card can be backed up to the server the same way, so a card is not something you can only lose once.

This is the backup route worth setting up

Everything else here is a file on one device. RomM is the only path that keeps your saves somewhere the headset is not, and it is the same server that already holds your games.

Needs an in-headset pass

The save model above — per-game saves, cartridge binding, two-press delete, the powered-on rule — is read from the source and is accurate. The exact layout of the cartridge’s own panel, and how sync progress is surfaced, have not been checked against a running build.