#save data

Context: FOLLOW SAVE DATAAAAAAAA

These are for the Dual Destinies Playthrough they did a while back and currently are in the middle of Investigations 2!!! It's super fun I 100% recommend it

A little Will animation I did for Save Data's Who's Lila finale!

(I originally wanted to draw more faces but I ran out of time lol, here's a bunch of screenshots under)

This one's easy!

Saves required specific hardware on the cartridge.

Here are some example boards of Super NES cartridges. Those black things are ROM chips where game data would be stored. Sometimes those black chips would also contain extra processing units (SuperFX, SA-1, CX4).

But those two top ones? That big round silver thing is a coin cell battery. When you play a cartridge based game, electricity flows through the circuits and creates the live game data. But when the electricity is turned off, that data decays and fades away. So when you turn the console on the next time, it's starting over from fresh data because all the old data disappeared.

Unless you have a battery. The battery will keep a tiny portion of the data "active" even after electricity stops flowing to the circuit board. And these batteries can last for 10-20 years.

But batteries are not free. And neither is the additional other hardware needed to store and retrieve the battery-powered data. Both of those top two circuit boards are a lot bigger than your standard SNES circuit board. That increases manufacturing cost, sometimes significantly!

Usually, the more special chips and backup battery storage needed for a game, the more that cost would get passed on to the consumer. Games with save batteries cost more to buy! Which could mean they were less likely to sell versus the competition.

It's also important to keep in mind that a lot of developers back in the day had to go through Nintendo (or Sega) in order to manufacture cartridges. Often, Nintendo was the one charging extra for manufacturing save battery support.

Which is why most Nintendo games (Super Mario World, Zelda, Metroid) had save batteries. They were making the cartridges for themselves! It was like they had a special discount. But for most third parties like Capcom or Konami, it made more financial sense to just stick to a password system -- unless the game was really long or complex, like an RPG.

In Japan, Nintendo solved this problem on the NES. The Famicom Disk System (FDS) basically allowed games to be published on rewritable floppy diskettes. You'd simply save to the same medium the game itself lived on. A lot of FDS games had to be converted to use a password when they came to America, because we never got the Disk System add-on.

Sega also tried to solve this with the Sega CD, which saved game data to internal storage.

The issue there is that this depended on you maintaining the battery inside the console itself, and since the storage had to be large enough to store data for multiple games, that battery drained much more quickly. If the battery on your console went dead, you lost all of your save data.

To get around that, Sega sold memory cartridges.

But again, there was still that battery issue. You can see the big coin battery right there!

With the Playstation, Sony used flash memory, which allowed data to be written to their memory cards without needing a battery to keep the data "alive."

And once the Xbox introduced the concept of an internal hard drive, worrying about save storage became a thing of the past.