Replace the Nintendo 64 Controller Pak's battery backup with flash memory!

So I was browsing the internets, as one does, when I discovered THIS TUTORIAL. Apparently, it's possible to negate the issue of losing the contents of your N64 Controller Pak by simply swapping the SRAM chip for a compatible FRAM chip. This removes the need for the battery to keep your saves alive. It almost sounds too easy, but I assume the guy who wrote this guide is on the up and up.

Anyway, the ability to modify Memory Paks to give them flash memory is pretty awesome, but what about other things? Stuff like NES games, SNES games, PC Engine memory cards and Neo Geo memory cards all used battery backup, do you think the same trick would work with them too?

 

I have seen this done for SNES games and memory cards, I think it was on the nesdev forum. It is also known to work for Pokemon Yellow cartridges, but causes glitches on other Pokemon games.

 

FeRAM is not Flash memory. It's a different type of non-volatile memory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferroelectric_RAM

It can mimic SRAM in this case and may be reasonably suitable because the controller pak data is likely accessed and more importantly written at low frequency. But in other cases like on the NES, GameBoy, and SNES you may have problems as some games will use the SRAM area as workram and write it at a very high frequency. Most SNES games will probably not do this, but on NES it's very likely.

The better solution is to have a device like the EverDrive 64 with a program that can backup and manage controller pak data to a standard Flash Card Media like SD or CF. But with the low frequency of writes maybe it'll work out excellent.

 

Damn, and the chip swap sounded like such a good solution too! Well, at least it would be useful for a N64 controller pak, but would it also work for a neogeo and pc engine memory card too? For carts, has anyone made a device that can interface with them to copy and restore save data to a memory card? I've heard the retron is suppose to able to do this, but it's buggy.

 

There's various methods to back up the saves, depending on the console.

Old-school game copiers often had the ability to backup the save files from cartridges. There's also the Retrode USB device. For the N64, you could use a Gameshark to dump the save files to the memory pak, and use something such as Everdrive to then dump the memory pak to SD card.

 

I actually made a turtorial on this!

http://www.assemblergames.com/forum...utorial!-Backup-those-precious-N64-save-games!