Hello! I am learning to run this game, but haven't been able to get savestates working on my PowerPak. The savestate functionality doesn't work on any version of the game I've tried, English or Japanese. I've searched a lot but haven't been able to find out any information on how to get savestates working. It would help my practice a lot, had anyone had any luck getting them to work? :)

Oh, and if extra hardware like an NES equivalent of Game Saver+ would work then I could use them with my actual carts, but I'd rather not spend extra cash on hardware unless it's absolutely necessary... well, and I know nothing about it (Action Replay/etc?) :3

See if you can get ahold of Junkyard_Dave on twitch. He has researched this extensively. The gist of what I got from him was that there isn't a known way to get save state support in CV3 on an NES, because none of the products available support save states on MMC5 cartridges.

But I may have missed something...

Personally I started on emulator for a while then switched to NES & a CRT monitor, once I decided to shell out the cash for it and capture hardware. I had to just about completely relearn the game because of the difference in latency. Basically a lot of the time I spent doing complete runs was wasted :( If you're starting out fresh, I would suggest that you at least drill the Drac fight on emulator w/save states -- it's long and difficult, and the game starts you back pretty far if you die. You might also want to drill the Cyclops fights if you're doing Grant, and maybe Death as well. I'm sure there are others in the other character runs, I just don't know them.

For practicing the less intense parts of the game, using the HELP ME code (10 lives) and passwords is pretty manageable for the most part.

FYI, as of the latest firmwares, save states work on Everdrive, just in case anyone reading this was wondering. Figured this out myself recently, after being disappointed that save states didn't work with this one.

Firmware Here: http://krikzz.com/forum/index.php?topic=7811

MMC5 up until recently wasn't supported for save states on any flash cart as it's actually a pretty complicated memory mapper. It allows the NES to access (or in other words, address) more program ROM than would normally be possible by managing switching to different parts of the ROM (or different ROM chips, depending on the design of the cart) to grab needed data. It can contain some work RAM to expand on the NES's own RAM, depending on the cart, and has onboard RAM in the chip itself. It's also responsible for the extra sound channels heard on the Famicom. For the time, it was similar in capability and function to the SNES's SA-1 expansion chip.

If you're interested, you can read more about it here: https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/MMC5

It's no small feat to properly code the handling of all of that in relation to save states, and I'm impressed it works as well as it does.

Hope this post is worth the thread necromancy. What's a Castlevania forum without a little necromancy, eh?