Emulator

Forgot to mention that ending the emulation and then importing the .gci file will work perfectly fine.

Which is the usecase I'd want you to use :)

Well the thing is that it takes longer to do that, and that I am also switching between save files a lot.

I am part of a speedrunning community, and have custom save files made, so I use them a lot.

The thing about doing this is that it's a bit of an issue of corrupting the memory card accidentally. What I'd really recommend is using Dolphin's GCI folder feature, and just swapping them in/out of there and seeing if that works. Also, turning the memory card off/on should get it to reload the savefiles as well. Turn off memory card, import, turn memory card back on.

You could technically get twice as many saves by having 1 save on the memcard and a different on in the GCI folder, and just switch between them.

@JMC4789 The problem with that is that I usually use 4.0.2, as it has the least amount of issues for me, and this version doesn't have the option to use the GCI folder feature.

I can't help you if you want to use outdated versions.

But, I'm curious, what issues do you have that you'd want to use a version of the emulator that doesn't even emulate bounding box correctly?

@JMC4789 I've had some issues on newer versions in which the game would crash, and the crash would somehow cause my graphics driver to stop responding.

oh right. I think the Intel HDs still don't support bounding box lol. Ignore me.

JMC4789 wrote:

The thing about doing this is that it's a bit of an issue of corrupting the memory card accidentally. What I'd really recommend is using Dolphin's GCI folder feature, and just swapping them in/out of there and seeing if that works. Also, turning the memory card off/on should get it to reload the savefiles as well. Turn off memory card, import, turn memory card back on.

You could technically get twice as many saves by having 1 save on the memcard and a different on in the GCI folder, and just switch between them.

Nether one will allow you to change the save of a game that is running

For memory cards, the entire card is in RAM and only written to disk, any changes made by other programs or even the memory card manager, will be overwritten as soon as the game saves to the memory card again.
The one time a memory card file is read from the disc is when the game is booted.

GCI folder is similar, but only reads the gci file into RAM the first time the game reads the save, from there it is never read from the disk again.

One option is to open an exclusive handle on the memory card file when a game is running, but I was under the impression that it was inherintly obvious that you can't change the save file while running a game