• any of em are fine

opinions of varying quality. fishcat with five hammers, not afraid to use them. made out of meat, but no nutritional value.


did any gbc games use non-volatile storage for saves? i was reading https://web.archive.org/web/20141105020940/http://problemkaputt.de/pandocs.htm#mbc1max2mbyteromandor32kbyteram and the comment about RAM write enable made me realize that RAM is in fact where saves are stored. you would disable writes to that region so that the cpu going on the fritz as it's powered off won't scribble over save data. sure.

so.. has anyone talked in depth about designing gameboy/gbc cartridges? the timeline for nor flash seems to line up such that maybe the latest cartridges could have used an 8kb chip for saves, if they were available in, like, 1999. then you wouldn't need a battery in the cart and might offset the cost. maybe putting ram there instead makes sense for developer flexibility? i think the mbc parts and general cartridge design was in tandem with Nintendo, and something really custom would have been price-prohibitive if they would have been okay with such a thing at all.

why not have a split of 4kb ram + 4kb nor flash to have some space but not need a battery? was flash reliability a concern at the time? eventually mbc6 looks to support non-volatile storage in the cart, but then... wasn't used. was this a price issue? someone certainly thought about this stuff and i wish i knew what they were thinking!!


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