I haven't been successful in finding any documentation on the .psv savestate format -- .psv is the savestate format for psxfin/pSX -- so I was wondering if anyone knows offhand how the RAM stored a .psv savestate relates to how the PlayStation itself stores RAM values. As best I can tell, .psv savestates contain uncompressed RAM, VRAM and SRAM/sound RAM.

I think knowing the starting address of RAM in a .psv savestate should be enough, though I'm not sure whether this value is consistent across games. If not, I guess the next step is to get a RAM dump from Xenogears and try to find the data there.


Specifically, I've found that a certain address in a .psv savestate controls whether the party members in Xenogears are in their Gears or on-foot*. While this is only a novelty in terms of practical usefulness, I thought it would be cool to contribute this info to anyone who's keeping a running list of Xenogears memory addresses.

*Those addresses being 0x6FB95 for the first active party member; 0x6FB96 for the second active party member; and 0x6FB97 for the third active party member. They're just on-off switches, one byte each. A value of 0x00 means the character is in his or her Gear. A value of 0x01 means the character is not.

You could've looked at PVV's source


Load a pSX savestate into PVV to see the block IDs. I'd guess the RAM is in the 'R''A''M'#0 block; it's (2 * 1024 * 1024) + 1024 bytes in size.