Something went wrong. Try again later
    Follow

    Battery Backup

    Concept »

    The ability to save a cartridge-based game to the cartridge. The battery is usually good for tens of thousands of saves, and made ridiculously long character passwords obsolete.

    Short summary describing this concept.

    No recent wiki edits to this page.

    Overview

    Ever had to use a d-pad to type out a password that looks like this? "000ys T0J300 m2001C H000aS" (Kid Icarus).

    Ever had to wonder if that was a 0 or an O... or a number 1, capital I, or lowercase l?

    Ever tried to play a game where they got "cute" and used pictures or symbols for their level passwords, instead of simple letters? (Microcosm)

    No?

    Then thank battery backup!

    Battery backup is the term for storing a player's progress within a small battery within a game's cartridge. The immediate benefit is that players can instantly resume progress from where they left off without inputting a memorized password. The downside however is that the save is not perminant. While the battery lasts a long time, a long time isn't forever. It's estimated that most of the batteries used to perform this function had a lifetime of about 10 years after which a players save would be corrupted. To use an example, if you were to of played Metroid when it first came out and jotted down your password, you could still play that file today. If you played Super Metroid at launch, however, your save file probably doesn't exist anymore.

    sizepositionchange
    sizepositionchange
    positionchange
    positionchange
    positionchange
    bordersheaderpositiontable
    positionchange

    This edit will also create new pages on Giant Bomb for:

    Beware, you are proposing to add brand new pages to the wiki along with your edits. Make sure this is what you intended. This will likely increase the time it takes for your changes to go live.

    Comment and Save

    Until you earn 1000 points all your submissions need to be vetted by other Giant Bomb users. This process takes no more than a few hours and we'll send you an email once approved.