This Hourglass project looked promising, but unfortunately is now discontinued and still has very low compatibility.

The only alternative i’ve found is via virtualization, so i’ve tried the latest version of the usual big players: VirtualBox and VMWare Workstation (VMWare Player has no snapshots support).

Saving and restoring snapshots in virtual machines is not exactly as quick as savestates in Retroarch, since they do not support shortcuts and require you to give each snapshot a name for no reason.

The snapshots themself also take a lot of disk space and cannot be overwritten, so avoid taking too much of them and delete them when they are not needed anymore.

The first product i’ve tried is VirtualBox, being open source and based on Qemu i had good hopes for it. Unfortunately it quickly turned them down:

• poor 3D acceleration performances (<60fps even with old 2D games)
• some games were crashing after switching fullscreen or maximing the VM display, some had other glitches after restoring snapshots
• 3D acceleration support for WinXP hosts was removed in v6.1.x

Then i’ve switched to VMWare Workstation and i’ve soon noticed much better 3D acceleration performances: i was getting 60fps in most games, with only occasional slowdowns.

Snapshotting saving/restoring is as fast as VirtualBox, but i’ve experienced less issues after restoring them.

Overall, if you are looking for an easy way to have savestates in Windows games, VMWare Workstation seems the best choice.