$150 USD Bounty for a mod [CLAIMED]

Now please forgive me if I'm outside the realm of possibility on this. I'm not insanely familiar with modding this game and the in depth technicalities.

I'm LiquidWiFi. Speedrunner for this game. I'm offering this 150 USD bounty on someone creating a save state mod, or program for SHAR. I have enjoyed testing, strat finding and many other things but a save state mod would insanely increase the efficiency of practice, and allow me to search for new things with much less struggles

For the bounty to be claimed, it has fully functional, and be able to remember the games state and call back to it at any moment (with the exception of a game crash of course). The mod must be sent to me for testing and upon confirming it functions as requested I will send the money via pay-pal

This is a big ask I understand. Hence why I have put the bounty on it. I don't know anyone who has the capabilities of producing this but this post was to see if someone was lurking around who may have the skill.

I hope someone creates this! If you have any questions, you can message me directly on twitter or discord, or reply to this thread.
- Liquid

And then Donut Team makes a hack that does something like this without requesting anything in exchange. Seriously, you didn't need to offer any kind of bounty. Donut Team gives us all of their tools for free (with the exception of several people making fun of Jake Raviøli's name).

I've been thinking about this since you mentioned it last night. It won't be easy that's for sure. I think the more logical way to do it will be to use data gleamed from reverse engineering to figure out what to save, and try and do it specifically in the context of the game. Figure out all the global data and save it in a way that can be restored. I think this could be possible within constraints but the savestates would be rather large and there may be issues, especially if you want to explore weird glitchiness where the "undefined" realm takes over.

A traditional emulator savestate works by saving the entire "state" (setup) of the emulated hardware, which is easy inside emulators because they control all the hardware and hide the real hardware. SHAR has no emulator and so you'd need to save the entire state of the PC to work generally - this is impossible if you aren't the operating system. It doesn't seem possible in Windows to even get the CPU context easily, but even with CPU+RAM restoring it would likely fail - the OS data would need to be the same (files, devices, etc) and any other hardware (GPU) would need to be in the same state. In short, a true generic save state of a Windows program is going to be difficult to impossible, and will break if Windows gets updates or the hardware changes, which makes it much more limited than emulator savestates (e.g. sharing wouldn't be possible). Which is probably why none exists yet.

The other simple method is to use a virtual machine, which isn't really an emulator but works similarly enough in that it insulates the virtual machine from the physical hardware. Most virtual machines do support a savestate feature (well VMware does) but it would be slow, and you'd lose FPS compared to native hardware which may be a major issue for glitches and tricks.

Btw the bounty offer isn't payment to get the hack, it's to motivate development on such a tricky hack :) I am sure whoever produced it would make it freely available.

The purpose of the bounty is for motivation. Not as payment. And it may catch the eye of people who know more about this stuff, and aren't vocal within the community.

I'm not paying someone for the mod itself, I'm saying if someone takes their own time to create a functional one then they will have their efforts paid out since it is such a big request