For When You Need To Backup Those Saves
The Open Source Cartridge Reader is a great diy project for dumping your own roms and saves. If you order a kit with the surface mount components already installed, it's also a great beginner soldering project.
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Awesome project. Please crosspost this to ![email protected]
Thanks and done
The closest thing I ever used that backed up actual hardware was a Playstation 1 card reader. At the time I was backing up game saves and porting them to the ps2 for emulation or something i forget exactly.
It was wild to do something like that on your computer back then. A Sony memory card in your PC? Bonkers.
Once I extracted my Fire Emblem 7 GBA cartridge's save to keep stuff I had unlocked and play it elsewhere.
It was easy, I didn't need any special hardware beside a DS and a flash cart, and a bit of homebrew software.
Cloud saved banjo kazooie runs. The future is now.
I built one of these a couple weekends back and have been blissfully extracting ROMs from my cartridge collection since then. I love it so much, and it's a really solid design!
Nice! I got my Save the Hero Builders OSCR and it's fantastic. Backed up my whole cartridge collection
Yeah they make pretty solid prebuilts, this was a diy kit.
Awesome project.
Love my retrode 2 but this one looks awesome.
The retrode was a good device when you could buy it. What I like about this one is that you can dump all the popular cart systems without needing adapters, while being able to build additional adapters for less common systems.
I thought the saves were in my memorypak though?
Most N64 games don't actually use the controller pak, instead using their own battery saves
Hmmm, I still have my N64, all my old games, etc and could test. Do you know if there is a way for me to check the memorypak to see what games actually saved to it?
Now that you mention it, I recall either OoT or MM saving to the cart directly.
Edit: May have found my own answer:
Will check and report back.
To add to this, the reader also has a N64 controller port so you can also dump memory cards via a controller.
IIRC none of the games that require the expanded RAM module (DK64, OOT, Majora) actually utilize its RAM under normal conditions. For instance, DK64 only used it as a means to stave off a memory leak.
That's a myth, the ram was a requirement by management at the beginning of development to showcase it's use. The ram was heavily used for the dynamic lighting. Sources: https://www.gamesradar.com/how-the-n64-confidently-signposted-our-way-into-the-3d-future/ and https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2019/11/feature_donkey_kong_64_devs_on_bugs_boxing_and_20_years_of_the_dk_rap
Oh well shit, that’s metal