Pulling NES Saves off Cart?

Hey y'all,

I'm trying to find out how to pull my save files off of my old NES carts. I feel like I've heard talk of this from Jeff in videos and/or podcasts, but can't seem to find how to do it with Google efforts and forum searching.

I have an Analogue Mini NT. Does that help me in my quest at all?

Thanks to anyone who can bless me with your wisdom. I'm not the most tech savvy and really want to pull my old saves while the 30 year old batteries in my carts are still alive.

THANKS!

Brad was dumping his saves during "Super NT Super Stream". He used Retrode, but I think they are hard to get.

Yes, you can use kevtris' jailbroken firmware for the Analogue Nt mini to dump saves off of NES carts. Might not support every game, but the README.txt claims "There's a lot of mappers supported" so you're probably good? Not sure if it's cool to link to from here, but once you've found the firmware it sounds as simple as extracting the contents of a zip file to an SD card.

The Retrode supports dumping SNES and Genesis/Megadrive saves (and Gameboy, GBC, GBA, N64 and possibly other system saves with the right firmware and physical cartridge adapters - EDIT does not support dumping GBA saves, I misremembered). No NES support for the Retrode; last I checked someone was working on it but progress stalled.

@shybry: @kuku:

Thanks to you both for the info. Sounds like the elusive Retrode couldn't save me even if I got my hands on one.

@shybry Any idea if what you're suggesting would work with a Mac? No PC in my home.

@ep_driver: No PC required. If you don't have one already you'll need an SD card that fits in your Nt mini and a way to read/write the card from your Mac. I'm not sure what maximum capacity SD card the NT mini supports; you might want to look this up before buying anything (and if you can't find any information, I'd assume 64GB would be too big and get something smaller). There are plenty of USB SD card readers that would work fine with a Mac and I'd assume they all do these days, to be honest.

Once you've extracted the jailbroken firmware onto the SD card and are running it, it looks like to actually dump the save you'll need to follow some instructions which might be a bit tricky if you're not tech-savvy... The trickiest of which is you'll need to know the NES mapper number for the game. The firmware's README.txt links to a large document listing mapper numbers for many games, so if you're OK with looking up a number in a document per game you should be fine.

Beware that the jailbroken firmware almost definitely voids your Nt mini's warranty, so don't try any of this if that's important to you. If you're still interested I'd recommend finding the firmware and reading the README.txt; if the installation and dumping instructions don't make any sense, maybe don't do it yourself?