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Comment by gdk | Hacker News Reader

> This glitch can permanently ruin a game file and, in the extreme case, possibly even erase or damage your cartridge.

How can this glitch erase the ROM in a cartridge?

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I doubt it's implying that. It's maybe possible that you could glitch the save data in a way that the game would crash or misbehave just from trying to read it, though, with no way to fix it short of discharging the save data somehow (I don't recall if gameboy games used battery backup or some kind of flash).

> It's maybe possible that you could glitch the save data in a way that the game would crash or misbehave just from trying to read it, though

Exactly. Most console games tend to treat saved game data as non-hostile, because they assume that only their own code will write it; buggy loaders that crash on corrupted data are not uncommon. (This has changed with more recent consoles, after multiple cases of saved game exploits used for jailbreaking; see, for instance, http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Category:Homebrew_exploits .) Memory-corruption bugs in games can overwrite saved games in ways that lead to such issues.

It's actually really easy to accidentally erase Link's Awakening save data by just flipping the power switch off and on too quickly (I have done this a few times). So I presume this would fix a glitched save.

Game Boy games used a CR2016 or (later on) a CR2025 battery to maintain save data.

These are soldered in place, which makes replacing batteries rather annoying, though they're replaceable if you put in the effort.

I actually did replace the battery of a zelda cartridge on GameBoy when I was a kid. The battery wasn't even the right size and barely fitted inside it, so I had to use some tape to hold it together.

That day my older brother treated me like a genius. (That day only)

Unfortunately that trend didn't continue with the GBA, whose games tended to use semi-volatile memory chips that will die after enough time or read/writes. Many of my old GBA games won't hold a save longer than a day or two anymore, without any viable way to repair them. Too bad, so sad.

But hey on the bright side emulators for GBA and GBC are seemingly perfect and run on anything. If someone makes a Gameboy advance micro clone for emulators that is decent I would buy that in a heartbeat.

If you already have a GBA Micro, or other GBA, you can just get a Everdrive GBA: http://krikzz.com/store/home/42-everdrive-gba-x5.html

IIRC many of them use SPI flash or EEPROM, which you should just be able to pop off and replace with a similar part.

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