"Please do NOT touch the power or the memory card!" ~click~ AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!

[Monica]

^--- That's how I felt when I hurridly saved my Zelda OoT game and turned the GC off totally forgetting about the warning on the screen >_<

Luckily my file was all right. (I would DIE if I had to do all that again, since I'm in Jabu Jabu.)

I was just wondering who else has done this, on any system. Did your game survive?

[stormwatcheagle]

My FF6 cart keeps losing my save files after about a year. It's annoying.

[Vagla]

I believe that would be due to the battery in the cart dying; it uses a battery to keep a specific section of RAM on the cart from being deleted between gaming sessions. When the battery runs out, the data is gone. Also, if you turn off the power while this RAM is being accessed (ie during saving or a save-game load), then the data will usually be lost.

Anyway, I've never turned off the power during a save, but I've had many problems with N64 controller paks. Commonly I would get errors claiming that the paks couldn't be read. Every game I tried would say that the pak had some kind of problem with it, but one game (Bomberman 64, great game! ;)) actually opted to repair it. So, thanks to this game, I was able to keep all my save files. I would have been *extremely* angry if I had lost those, heh.

[System Error]

And I heard one person asked Nintendo about questions like SNES carts losing data, and they just said "It happens." What a lame excuse, ya bums. Maybe it was intentional? Who knows. I've never done it. But once, I was up playing Spryo 3 around midnight and I finished one of the speedways, and the game froze when saving. Luckily, it survived, but I lost the Speedway data for that level. ._.

As for Vagla's problem, yeah, some games are nice like Bomberman 64. Others just sit there like babies and bitch at you about problems.

[stormwatcheagle]

Damn, so I gotta openit up and put in a new battery? great.

[The Savior]

Replacing the battery takes less than 2 minutes, what the hell are you whining about?

[MottZilla]

There are 2 different ways that have been used for saving games. Back in the days of NES, SNES, Genesis, Battery backed RAM was used, and there was a lithium battery powering a ram chip while the system was off, and whenever it's on, the system powers the battery. If the system is suddenly turned off, the battery keeps the RAM alive.

Nowdays, things like memory cards, use EPROMs to save.

Also, for instance GoldenEye for N64 used EPROM saving. What does thing mean? No battery, meaning your data will last as long as the chip does. So consider that, under decent care, A REALLY REALLY LONG TIME.

And ya, the thing that proves lazyness, is when games WON'T realize your data is just corrupted and try to fix it, or it knows it's fucked but refuses to do anything about it, not even reallocate the space it took up.

Asking for it to repair your data is a bit much, but asking for a simple prompt to erase and reformat your chip isn't.

[System Error]

That would still work, reformatting. I heard of a Perfect Dark glitch that literally corrupts everything on the Memory Card. >_<