Some important notes about saving your game:

Most emulators have save-state functions -- that is, you can save an exact moment of game play to a file. For example, in NESticle you can press F5 to save state and F7 to load it again. Doing so allows you to save your game anywhere, anytime, like along a bridge spanning a river, or while surrounded by monsters in a dungeon. Most people who use this feature do so only to stop playing for a time, so that they can pick up where they left off at a later time. Others use it as a kind of "insurance" -- "If you get whacked, hit F7 instead of walking all the way back."

Whatever your use for save-states, there is one thing you should remember: It restores what all 3 save files looked like when you first recorded that moment. For example, suppose a friend of yours has been playing ZeldaC for an hour, and now it's your turn to use the computer. You get really far, say to the 4th or 5th dungeon, and then your friend comes back to play again. If he hits restore-state to call up his current progress, he'll wipe out everything you did since he left.

If you're the only person playing ZeldaC on the computer, then you've nothing to fear. Just make sure you don't hit restore-state when you meant to hit save-state. But if you're dealing with multiple save files, the safest way to go is either for all parties to rely on the game's save option, or for all parties to keep backed-up copies of their save-states in a separate folder on the computer. Nothing's more frustrating than to spend hours progressing through a long game, and then to watch all that effort go up in smoke.

By the way, to bring up this screen immediately during gameplay, simply press Start on controller 1 (or the emulator's equivalent) and then press "Up and A", at the same time, on controller 2. And of course, CONTINUE returns you to the beginning of the overworld or current dungeon, SAVE will save your game and return you to the file select screen, and RETRY will take you to the file select screen without saving any current progress.

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