A way to fix save corruption
 

Well, not really. This post is an answer to a question nobody asked: how to get on with a career that has a corrupted save at the end.

We all read that you shouldn't save whilst underwater, or when close to other vessels, but when a save dumps you to the desktop at load time, it's corrupted and you have to go to an earlier one - if you're lucky.

I've found that such is not always true, in about 80% of cases I've been able to recover my game, in the following way.

I have my career [Ramcourse], which ends in a save at sea [sea1]. The next time I try to load, the load bar creeps close to full, and BAM! I'm staring at my desktop.

Nil desperandum! I have a second career [Dummy], and I start a new career in the same flotilla, in the same year, as my corrupted save. I load the mission, and as soon as I'm looking at the inside of my brand spanking new sub, I end the mission, and go back to the career menu.

Now I go back to my main career [Ramcourse], and I launch my 'corrupted' save [sea1]. Lo and behold, it loads! Well, 50% of the time. If it doesn't work, I try again, and often that does the trick. My rule of thumb is that a save is only really lost if three tries don't work.

For a higher success rate: kill all memory hogs (see Taskmanager), and don't start a new load when the IDE LED of your machine is still showing activity.

It's important that the dummy career starts with the same flotilla, or you'll get reassigned to Dummy's flotilla at a random moment during your mission. It's important to use the same year, because otherwise your high-tech equipment self-destructs randomly.

It's obviously a screw-up in SHIII's initialization from a save, and some remnants of an old load remain in a new one, but in this way you can get by.

I hope this helps people who are as frustrated as I was.

Keywords: CTD, failure to load, corrupt, corrupted save, savegame, crash, crash to desktop

Thank you very much for posting this. I am going to add it to my SH3 notes and will try it the next time I get a CTD crash upon loading.

I wish I had seen this last week, as I had saved a rather exciting game after a successful battle with a V&W Destroyer, only to find that it would not load again, so I went back to a previous save point. 8^ )