New answers tagged game-cartridge
4
I'd like to offer an additional reason, from the point of view of a game developer.
Part of the requirements for a game to pass the submission/approval process was to limit the number of times the save data is written to. This is actually still in force to some degree on the Nintendo Switch. Flash memory can only handle a finite number of writes before it ...
34
Game Boy games do not always need a manual save operation. There's no hardware reason that would prevent Game Boy games from saving in the way you describe.
For the Game Boy hardware, RAM present on the cart can be used by games for whatever it needs.
SRAM is RAM on the cartridge; most of the time, it's backed up by a battery and used to store save data, ...
32
Microprocessors have a minimum operating voltage spec, but that generally doesn't mark a threshold where they stop executing code. Instead, it specifies level below which they aren't guaranteed to execute instructions correctly. When a game is powered off, a processor may execute a few hundred or a few thousand instructions between the time the voltage ...
7
I'm not a specialist but what I read is that the battery-backed SRAM module is on the cartridge, not in the console itself.
The technique you're describing is roughly the one used in emulators (known as "save states"). Emulators aren't aware of the game mechanics, they just dump the whole RAM + state of hardware registers in a file, and reload it ...
Top 50 recent answers are included
