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 quick save.
• F8 loads it back.

A small on-screen note confirms each action ("Quick save written" / "Quick save loaded", or "No quick save to load" / "Save state failed"). Both keys are rebindable in Preferences → Hotkeys.

There is one quick-save slot per game, stored as state0.sav in the gamebox's saves folder, so it travels with the game and never collides with another game's state.

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.