Save States

Save States

DOSBox Pure can serialize the whole emulated machine, so EmuDOS lets you snapshot your exact place in a game and jump back to it.

Quick save / load

• F5 writes a new save state every time (it never overwrites a previous one).
• F8 loads the most recent one.

A small on-screen note confirms each action. Both keys are rebindable in Preferences → Hotkeys.

Each state is stored in the gamebox's saves folder as a timestamped, gzip-compressed state_<timestamp>.sav.gz (with a .png thumbnail and a small .json sidecar), so they travel with the game, stay small, and accumulate as a history rather than a single slot.

Browsing and pruning

Right-click a game → Manage → Save states to see every state for that game, each with its thumbnail and timestamp. Delete the ones you no longer need from there (each row also has Show in Explorer). Since states accumulate, the Manage window is where you keep them tidy.

How it works

Save and load run on the emulator thread between frames (serializing mid-frame would be unsafe), via the libretro retro_serialize / retro_unserialize interface. The state captures the entire machine — CPU, memory, and device state.

Caveats

Save states are reliable for plain DOS games, with a few things to know:

• A saved state expects the same game and settings it was made with. Changing the machine, CPU, or memory options can make an old state fail to load.
• A few games may not restore perfectly — this is a property of the core's serialization for that title, not of the slot handling.
• A booted Windows OS is the least reliable and largest case; quick saves are aimed at plain DOS games.