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Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

February 20, 2012 – 12:39 pm | 3 Comments

Tiny Diggers has just been released on the iPad and soon the Mac computer. Here’s the details on this fun, educational game from TouchTilt Games.
Tiny Diggers Delivers Learning With Construction Trucks For Kids on the …

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Home » PS2, PS3

PS3 Pet Peeve: Game Save Timestamps

Submitted by on May 5, 2007 – 8:00 am5 Comments

Hard Drive InternalsBack when I got the 40GB HDD for the PlayStation 2, one of the first habits I got into was to copy memory card saved games to a folder on the drive for backup purposes. One of the great crimes of the PS2 HDD was that you couldn’t use it to save and load game saves directly from a game, so it was basically backup storage you could only use from the Browser application built into the PS2.

One side effect of copying the game saves from your memory card to the HDD and back was that any timestamps on files within the saved game would all be set to the time the copy operation was performed. This was clearly an oversight, something that you’d think would come to light early in development and not be repeated on a successor console with a built-in hard drive.

I thought so too. But I was wrong.



The PS3 has the same quirk when copying PS2 game saves anywhere — onto the drive, off to a USB drive, or off to a CF, SD, or MSPD flash card. It overwrites the timestamp with the current time.

So far this doesn’t sound terrible, but if you opened up, say, your list of GTA San Andreas saved games to load up your game, you’d find all of them with the exact time down to the second that they were copied to or from the HDD. The same thing for the PS3. All of my saved games within the GTA:SA save file — and every other PS2 game for that matter — were set to the day I copied them to the PS3′s Hard Drive. The same goes for when I take my saved game on a flash memory card to a friend’s place, play there, save it back to the card, and then come back home. The saved games have the timestamp of when I copied them back onto the hard drive, not when I played them.

This is annoying and clearly an amateur mistake. How hard would it have been to preserve the timestamp on the file when it copied? Or maybe give us an option to change it or not?

  • http://www.routermall.com used cisco

    Wow, I never new this to be the case. That’s a major bummer. I suppose, at least with the archival backups, you could copy them indivindually based on age of the file, at least that way you’ll be able to distinguish which is which? This could be a real pain when it comes to a large number of backup files though. :(

  • trev

    Even as someone that has had no problems with their PS3, I will agree with you in part. It would be better if the original timestamps were preserved.

    On the other hand, the timestamps ARE accurate. That’s when you wrote to that file. It’s giving you accurate information, just not the info you want. If I recall, overwriting a file in the way you describe in the card example will get you a different timestamp on a PC as well.

    What they would need is two seperate times: One for when the file was modified, in PC style; and one for when the game was last saved, which would need to be part of the functionality of the game. I don’t think the console itself can tell the difference between writes (save/file copy).

  • Trev

    Sorry about that. Finger slipped and I thought it didn’t go through when the post error came up. Please remove one if possible. :/

  • http://www.aeropause.com James

    Gotcha back there, Trev.

    I noticed this time-stamp thing “problem” when I copied all my game saves from my 40 HDD to the PS3. I was wondering when you’d get around to complaining about it. :-D

    I’m not a big GTA fanboy but I know that HDD screwed your gamesave. That needs to be avoided.

  • http://www.farbot.com/ Paul Munn

    The thing about the GTA:SA game saves is that there is a hidden clock in each save that tells the game which one was last saved. When you boot the game up, it automatically scans all your saves and picks the one you last saved.

    God of War II and other games get around this by letting you see the game clock (hours and minutes played) on the game save before loading it. GTA:SA apparently has this information (in the stats, for example) but hides it on the loading menu.