Saved game files are not written to disk

[Richard42]

I have a problem with my Amiga gaming setup.  I have an A1200 with an accelerator/RAM board and 2GB internal CompactFlash card with CF-->IDE adapter.  I have noticed this problem with King's Quest 3 and 4.  The problem is that the game writes some files to the disk for the saved games.  I can quit out of the game (F10) and look in the "data" directory to see that the files are there.  But sometimes when I shut off the computer and re-start it later, the files are gone.

With KQ3 I was able to narrow down the problem a bit more.  If a savegame slot was written for the first time, then it was correctly stored to disk.  But if a slot was over-written, the data did not get written to disk.

This seems like a more general problem with the OS.  I tried moving all of the saved game files out of the data folder under KQ4 and putting them on the desktop.  But when I started the game, it found all of the saved files as if I hadn't moved them at all.

Can somebody help with this?  It seems to be a caching issue.  Some part of the system (OS?  disk drivers?) is caching these file operations but not flushing the cache back to the hardware.

[Richard42]

Is this running through WHDLoad?

Sorry I forgot to mention, but this is running under WHDLoad.  I forget the version; I bought it about a year ago.

[Richard42]

I am running version 17.0.4846 of WHDLoad, which appears to be current, and the v1.1 of the KQ4 loader, which also seems to be the latest.

It seems more like a system problem.  Why did the game still see all 4 savestate files even after I moved them to the desktop?

[Richard42]

I do always use F10/PrtScrn/*/whatever to exit out of the game.

I'm not sure what the filesystem type is; it was already formatted when I bought the CF card and IDE adapter off of ebay.  Can you tell me how to find out the filesystem type?

[Richard42]

Thanks again for the replies.  I'm sure that it's loading the key properly because I see my name on the splash screen.  I played with this again on Thursday night and didn't observe the problem.  I used the command prompt and the 'list' command to look at the timestamps of the files in the 'data' directory.  I found that these 4 files are actually floppy disk images, not savegame files.  I could see that disk 1 gets updated after I played the game, saved the progress, and quit.  I left the amiga running for much longer before I shut it down.  So maybe the problem was just that I shut off the machine too fast after exiting the game.  I'll see how it goes and post again if I run into this problem again.