nesdev.org

- Regarding deterioration over time, I wonder if it's possible to keep a cartridge completely frozen, perhaps inside an ice cube? Imagine melting the ice after 20 years!

if you froze an nes cartridge, even rapidly in LOX it would damage the cartridge.

If you want to preserve a cart you want to ether store it in a vacuum or in a camber filled with an inert gas in a relativity cool location in total darkness, even then nothing lasts forever

Fossilize the cart! I mean, that's how most things survived, even though not 100% usable.

Well... dump it to a ROM is probably the only way to technically make it last forever.

I don't know if it's true, but I imagine it's the case that most unlicensed stuff like Color Dreams and AVE are on OTP EPROMs. They'd be easy to repair if one knows how, but if they bit-rot I imagine they will become pretty rare in the future unless everyone starts desoldering and replacing the ROMs. I suspect that some 3rd-party games for the Atari 2600 may be in the same boat.

Makes me wonder too if an EPROM bit could get knocked out by cosmic radiation, in that case it may not be safe anywhere.

I guess the mask-rom carts will be OK if they don't have batteries, but some part of them would succumb to corrosion eventually, and probably the electrolytic cap and SMT parts would get stressed if it was stored without climate control.

Heheh the proven way to preserve it is to do like they did in Sumer. Take a stone cylinder, and inscribe your bits onto it. To make a copy, roll the cylinder across some clay or playdoh or something. That stuff is still somewhat readable after >6000 years, if anyone bothered to try and read it, heheh.

- Well, my Mega Man VI cart is safe inside a plastic bag, and it still smells new. The same for all my Nintendo64 carts - everything is perfect.