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Comment by gleenn | Hacker News Reader

I recently blew the dust off my GameBoy and Tetris game, put some fresh AA batteries in, and it happily booted up and played like a champ even after decades. I wish any hardware or software written today would preserve so well, everything requires internet connections and the hardware hardly lasts this long.

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I broke out my OG beige brick Gameboy and pokemon red about 5 years ago. I swapped out the dissolved acidic powder, cleaned off the terminals and threw in some fresh batteries before hitting the switch.

For a moment, I was deeply disappointed that nothing displayed. Then I remembered that they came with a brightness rotary dial. Swung that around and it was as good as the day I got it. The cartridge even held my childhood save.

What an incredible device.

Huh, shouldn't the save have vanished without power from the battery? My Pokémon gold save was already gone in 2018ish when I stumbled upon the cartridge plus gba, but then again that game contains an rtc, so higher power draw I guess.

Edit: got it, you helpfully left some batteries in the Gameboy for future you; you're not talking about opening the cartridge..

Pokemon Red had no real time clock. That was the fatal weakness of gold and silver.

Real time clock doesn't matter, I thought all Gameboy games had battery-backed saves. I can find forum posts of people talking about replacing batteries in their Red cartridges, troubleshooting why the game still won't save after replacing them, across iFixit, Reddit, GameFAQs. I'm pretty sure that G/S/C only took additional advantage of the existing battery, and didn't introduce an additional battery.

The RTC constantly ate power way more than the battery-backed RAM, that absolutely matters.

It makes a difference, absolutely, but the battery still exists and it's surprising for it to live for so long.

You're right that the save is going to vanish from the batteries, but tests and anecdata have shown that cartridge batteries on Game Boy can easily last more than three decades.

Pokémon Silver, Gold, and Crystal have a clock inside the cartridge, limiting their survivability to around a decade.

All Gameboy games (as far as I'm aware) have batteries inside the cartridge, the saves were stored on volatile memory and were battery-backed. Gold, Silver, and Crystal just made extra use of the battery with an RTC. I can find many instances across many forums of people talking and troubleshooting replacement batteries for their Red cartridges so I don't believe my memory is failing me here.

My selfwritten game with Microsoft xna still runs.

And I made that 18 years ago.

I had to change my intel q6600 only after upgrading my camera as Lightroom grinded to a hold with the bigger raw files.

Besides the Mainboard / capacity apocalypse ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague?wprov=sfla1 ) I'm genuin happy with how well older things still work.

Agreed. But keep in mind that is not perfect either, some games that use a clock feature depend on a small battery in the cartridge which is depleted after a decade or so

Same goes for saving games on the old systems — that's using a RAM chip kept alive by a battery inside the cartridge.

Depends on how old. NES and Game Boy were all batteries, but by the N64 and Game Boy Advance they had started to use Flash memory or EEPROMs in many games instead.

There's software in my phone I installed two months ago and which doesn't work anymore. It's not even anything that needs an online connection for its features, too.

We got out our Nintendo DS consoles and played some download play games recently (no internet required, one sends the game program directly to the other). Great fun! The battery is less easily replacable though.

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