Altirra - Drives, Exiting / Mapping

[JCat]

Altirra is my go to emulator for the computer and 5200. Just love it. I went through the documentation, command line help and google searches to no avail.

 

Sorry for all the questions, but I want to get this all sorted out.

 

What is the purpose of saving an image in a drive? For example, you have a game on 4 discs, and and you drop them into 4 drives to use the rotation feature. Now if you exit Altirra, it warns you about saving Drive memory. I see each Drive has its own save function. Where do you load these back in?

 

This may not be possible, but can you do a save state on a game with it's drive configuration (like the above), then load the state back in and have the drives also return in their order? I've tried, but the drive slots are empty when I load a save state. Ultimately, I just want to be able to play multi-disc games without having to re-attach them with each session.

 

Is there a way map an exit command to the joystick so Altirra can shut down (and I can get back to my front end?).

 

Thank you!

[phaeron]

You're getting the save warning on exit because the disks are set to virtual read/write mode and some of the disks have been written to. This causes the emulator to allow writes but store them only in memory -- the changes don't get saved anywhere unless you explicitly do so. Selecting Save will write them back to the original image file, Save As writes the whole modified disk to another file. Save only works if the disk image is an actual file; if it came from a .zip archive or a drag-and-drop from somewhere else, the entry will be blue to indicate that it there is no backing file only Save As will work. You can switch the default mounting mode from virtual read/write to read/write in Options, in which case the Save will happen automatically when possible. Regardless of how the save happens, the changes get saved into the same kind of image file you mounted in the first place and thus they're loaded the same way as well.

 

Save states do not restore the disk configuration, either the list of mounted disks or the disk contents. You can save the mounted disk list with a profile, but it may be much to set up a profile for every multi-disk game you play.

 

You cannot map Exit directly to a controller, but you can set up a console controller within an input map with the UI controls bound. The UI Menu button will activate the little known side menu, from which there is an Exit option. The preset for the Xbox 360 controller should have this mapped to the Y button with D-pad navigation.

[JCat]

Thank you for the detailed reply, Phaeron. It was very helpful!