SSI's Germany 1985 (Superpower series/RDOS) - saving in emulators

[Gatherer of Data]

I'm not particulary knowledgeable about Apple emulation, the filesystems, etc, but haven't run into unsolvable issues until now.

I'd like to use the ingame save option in SSI's Superpower series of games. Emulator snapshots might be an option, but I'd like to use the actual game save options, so save games are transferable between emulators etc. 

I have done most testing with Germany 1985, the first in the series, and AppleWin as well as MAME(MESS) emulators.

Once you start a game scenario, you can bring up the save screen with control +b.

The game wants you to initialize a save disk, after which you can choose to save a game by name in a list. I've only managed to come that far with the .nib file from Asimov, haven't had any luck with the other versions. That HDV file looked promising, but it boots up  a whole bunch of different SSI games. 🤨

 

Anyway, with the nib file, I can enter a save name, and return to the actual game, but the saves are not permanent, bringing up the save screen again, nothing is there.

 

Now, I've searched a bit, and found this RDOS page, which suggests these games might indeed be troublesome. There's blank disk available in the RDOSstuff archive which was tested with North Atlantic '86. It does indeed work with that game. But makes not difference for Germany 1985 for me.