StarCraft units, which as mentioned previously contained scads of pointers in the fields for linked lists, was an entirely different beast. It was necessary to fixup all the link pointers (taking special care of unioned pointer fields) so that all 1600 units could be written at once. And then unfixup the link pointers to keep playing. Yuck.
This Patrick Wyatt is an idiot. MMUs allow mmaping (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mmap) the dynamic (playfield/units state) and static areas (sprites/textures) of the game, so one can easily save/load memory ranges.
I think Blizzard is still afloat, because other programmers are even bigger idiots.