PS3 emulator RPCS3 finally adds save states

PS3 emulator RPCS3 has introduced a major new feature in save states, which will allow you to quickly suspend and resume your progress in any game at any time.

"After a lot of work from elad335 and much testing from the community," the devs say on Twitter, "we're thrilled to announce that RPCS3 now supports savestates!"

Save states are a common feature in emulators for older consoles. Essentially, a save state takes a snapshot of a game in progress and writes that snapshot to your hard drive. Then you can load your state back up and pick exactly where you left off. You can use save states as a way to suspend a game when there's no actual save point, or you can use them to cheat your way through challenging sections by save scumming through any mistakes.

But save states for more modern emulated platforms remain uncommon, since there's far more data to store for a snapshot. As RPCS3 developer AnnieLeo explains on Reddit, "We didn't think it was realistically feasible several years ago, but after a lot of work, it's here! Some savestates will be of a couple GBs of size depending on the game, and there are still certain limitations, but those are just small issues in the grand scheme of things."

There's one big limitation to RPCS3's save states right now, though: the game will close as soon as you make a save. The devs say this is "due to some technical reasons," and while you'll still technically be able to use this feature as a PC-style quicksave, you might be better off thinking of it along the lines of Xbox's Quick Resume function for now.

You can get full details on how these save states work over on the RPCS3 site.

Maybe it's time to dig back into the best PS3 games out there.