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Hi all, I'm new to the forum I have been looking all over the net for a way to make carts (right now Tetris & Dr Mairo) Save the score. I have no Idea why they didn't make the cart save scores from nintendo... but that time has long long pased...

I stumbled on to this forum (don't know how I found it) and after reading through some post, looking for what I need. I thought if any one would know how to do it, they would be the people on this forum

I made a arcade machine that run off a SNES Here is the link to what I did. http://www.maritimegamers.com/forum/vie ... f=24&t=362

After lots of looking I found a "Tetris & Dr Mairo" cart (witch is awesome for the arcade) but I seem it wasen't saving the score and I thought well must be a dead battery (I had to replace them befor) so I opened it up and suprize nindendo didn't put a Battery back up in it...

Obviously the hole point of a arcade is to get your name in it, and beat other peoples score. I don't want to leave the thing pluged in all the time (power is not free) so what I want to do is find a way to add a battery and what ever other parts are needed so that the cart will save the score.

If any one knows how to do this I would realy realy appreciate it!

Thanks,

Hypnos wrote:Hi all, I'm new to the forum I have been looking all over the net for a way to make carts (right now Tetris & Dr Mairo) Save the score. I have no Idea why they didn't make the cart save scores from nintendo

Cost.

It takes an extra RAM chip, a battery, and some passive circuitry to get persistent memory on a Game Pak. Games that could do without did do without. This process didn't stop until the Nintendo DS, when Nintendo reportedly started including the 4 kilobit serial EEPROM for free with every Game Card.

So there is no way for me to do it then?

Hypnos wrote:So there is no way for me to do it then?

Not impossible, but by no means an easy task.

I was hoping all I would need would be to wire a 2032 battery to a rezister or what not and to some pins on the Chip that holds the score inorder to keep it active.

This can be done but it involves some hacking and assembly language understanding.

Basically what you'd want to do is find the point in the game code where High Score entries occur. You'd branch to your own code after this to copy the High Score table into the battery backed RAM. Then you'd need to find the point where the High Score table is normally initialized and replace it with your own code that restores the table from battery backed ram. You'd also want to implement a checksum of some sort to verify that the contents of the battery backup are valid. That way if they are corrupted or if it's the first time loading up it won't load garbage values as the high score table. It also would save you from having to implement a method of clearing the score table.

That is beond my skill, with out lerning how to code for the system. and I'm not going to put that much time into it. I was hoping it would just involve some chips and soldering. I have never been good at coding.

Thanks for answering my question! I hate to think that there is a way to do something (that I can do) and I don't know it. Now I know this is not something I can do, so I'll just drop it.

Thansk Again!

I think it'd be possible if you use some kind of EEPROM but that'll defeinitely be complicated on the software side.

It takes an extra RAM chip, a battery, and some passive circuitry to get persistent memory on a Game Pak. Games that could do without did do without. This process didn't stop until the Nintendo DS, when Nintendo reportedly started including the 4 kilobit serial EEPROM for free with every Game Card.

Well I don't remember any GBA games with no saves - all the options I've seen is FlashROM saves, EEPROM saves and SRAM+battery saves. I might be wrong tough.

Bregalad wrote:Well I don't remember any GBA games with no saves

Sure, saves on GBA are more common than saves on Super NES because Nintendo was able to get the cost down by using serial EEPROM. But they weren't free yet; after looking through the cartridges I own, I see that Tetris Worlds, Pac-Man Collection, and most of the Classic NES Series don't have them.

There are games without saves on the GBA(I may have read your post wrong Bregalad). Of the top of my head I can think of Glory Days and the other hordes of password games.