November Contest: Megadrive / Genesis cart stacking

Is there a battery in there then? It's gotta be a flash cart, otherwise the game loaded in regular RAM won't have any place to put the save data for RPGs. I should open mine up and check.

EDIT: After reading back over, I realized that I might not have been clear. There's a separate Megadrive cart that fits into the dumping slot when playing a game off of a floppy. You can format it from the UI and use it to save data that would ordinarily go in the battery-backed RAM of an RPG or other title that stores your progress.

 

Yes, there's a battery to backup the SRAM. The battery is switched onto the SRAM when the console is turned off; flash doesn't require a battery at all and also you cannot replace RAM with flash since flash cannot be directly written to like RAM. So when a game cart has flash, it has to be programmed to know the special write algorithm.

When you load a game from disk on the MGH it's loaded into the internal DRAM which you can identify through the "expansion slot" on the bottom of the unit.

The special MGH Mega Drive cart you're talking about is not a flash cart, nor does it store battery-backed RAM, it just contains a ROM and SRAM to give the SNES real time save functions.

Back then (1992) flash wasn't available in reasonable 16-bit game sizes (16M+) so it was only suitable for handheld units. OT: 16M of SRAM at the time was probably $150+, so SRAM was rarely ever used to hold games, instead DRAM would be used even though it's much harder to interface with simply because it was probably $40/16M. MGH and all others of the time operate using DRAM for immediate game storage, SRAM for save storage which is only 256K (32KiB) and still cheap.