I’ve seen a “rewind” function in some operating systems, and it’s really handy (but potentially flaky).
Any interest in adding it? We have fast-forward, which a lot of people love. I actually found myself using rewind more frequently.
Rewind is definitely a cool and useful feature. Especially for those “oops” moments however it comes with its own problems particularly in the context of RetroArch.
While it is implemented in RetroArch, it comes with some significant caveats that are worth mentioning. The biggest concern is that rewind puts undue stress on the system, especially storage. It works by constantly saving snapshots of the game state, sometimes multiple times per second. These snapshots often get written to the primary mSD card, leading to:
- Frequent write operations, which can wear out flash storage over time.
- Noticeable performance impacts, since saving and managing those states takes up CPU and IO bandwidth.
- Game slowdown or stutters, due to either the device itself or sometimes how the RetroArch core has been written.
So while it is an awesome feature, it’s not something everyone enables by default, largely due to the performance and hardware implications. You can enable it through the RetroArch settings by going into RetroArch via Applications and then saving the global configuration. However for muOS we feel that there is a difference between convenience and system longevity and performance.
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