ParlorSaves and save states
Parlor keeps two kinds of progress. The game's own save — what a cartridge's battery would have held — and save states, which freeze the whole machine at an instant. Both are written to disk on a schedule you never have to think about.
Battery saves
- Written automatically every 30 seconds while playing and again whenever you pause, background, quit or close the window. A clean save costs nothing; a failed write is retried.
- Includes the real-time clock for Game Boy games that have one, so clock-based events keep running between sessions.
- Stored under the cartridge's hash, not its filename. Rename, re-import or delete the game and the save stays with it.
- A
.savfile placed next to a game when you import it is adopted as its battery save, if the game doesn't already have one.
Save states
| Slot | How it's made | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Quick slot | Save pill, L3 on a pad, F1 on a keyboard, or the pause menu | One slot, overwritten each time |
| Auto | Every time you leave the game | What a tap on a library card resumes |
| Slots 1–7 | The pause menu | Numbered, each with a screenshot |
| Recovery | Only after a sync conflict | Never used for automatic resume |
Every state is saved with a screenshot, and that thumbnail shows in the pause menu, the game's details page, and the library's Saves menu.
Save states are tied to the emulator core that made them. Battery saves aren't. If a future Parlor version updates a core in a way that breaks old states, the release notes will say so — keep an in-game save before updating if you're mid-run.
Resuming
- Tap a card in the library to resume from the newest resumable state — usually the auto-state.
- Choose a save… from the card's long-press menu or the hero's Saves menu picks a specific slot.
- Start New Game boots the cartridge cold. Your battery save still loads; only the state is skipped.
- On launch, a Continue where you left off? toast offers the last auto-state.
What syncs
Battery saves, all save states with their screenshots, and the record of which game you played last. They travel through your private iCloud database to every device on the same account. See iCloud sync for how conflicts are handled without losing either side.
Where files live
Everything is inside the app's own container: Battery/<hash>.sav and States/<hash>/<slot>.state with a .jpg beside each state. On a Mac the app is sandboxed, so these aren't meant to be edited by hand — a device backup or iCloud carries them.