I opened my Kid Icarus cart

offensive_jerk

To my surprise, I find a place to solder a battery in. This game would be much much better with a save feature.

Probably not possible, eh?

Did anyone else ever notice this?

dangevin

I remember something about Metroid being a savable game on Famicom or FDS; same era. I guess we got stuck with ridiculously long codes instead (essentially us hardcoding the data the computer would save anyways).

Waterclocker

I think mine was the same way when I opened it to clean it.

bunnyboy

Boards were used for many games, so its common for things like batteries to have a space but not be used. SNROM was used in Bomberman 2, DW2, FF, Metroid, etc. If you add the battery it will likely do nothing because the game does not expect it to be there.



Thread hijack!



In 1986 the Metroid FDS disk was bigger than a NES cart at 128KB. That much memory in cart chips was simply too expensive. Because the FDS is a floppy it was easy to have save files. By 1987 memory prices had come down, and Metroid was one of the first 128KB NES games. It was probably just decided that adding the battery for save features was too expensive since the passwords are relatively small. Zelda/Zelda 2 were the only games in 1987/1988 to have batteries. You don't want the FDS version of Metroid because it doesn't have the armorless Samus

BootGod

I've wondered in the past how much work would it take to hack Metroid / Kid Icarus to use a battery instead. Doesn't seem like it would be too tough, maybe one of these days I'll give it a shot.

Waterclocker

You would have to flash some eproms with the code that supports the save function.  Maybe a translated rom or the original japanese rom.  You would also have to steal a save chip from another game with the correct size.  Who knows what you would have to rewire.  Maybe you could reverse engineer the famicom version or swap roms.  Keep us posted if you try.

BootGod

You wouldn't need to take the "save chip" from another cart, it is already present. Hardware-wise, you'd just need to install the battery, and replace the PRG ROM with a flash rom or eprom and of course the little re-wiring neccesary for pinout differences. Or you could just use bunnyboy's MMC1 repropak

offensive_jerk

Right, It would appear most if not all of the hardware to be able to save is there. The thing is, the game itself is programmed to use the password. I figured it would be hard to do, but may as well ask.....

Waterclocker

If the save chip is there couldn't you just swap out the roms from the famicom version?  I don't think it would be very cost effective though.

BootGod

AFAIK, Metroid was not available in cartridge form in Japan, only FDS. Kid Icarus might be in the same boat, but I'm having trouble remembering what name it went under in Japan

Shags

It is Hikari Shinwa: Palutena no Kagami

BootGod

Ah yes it is, and it is indeed FDS as well

bunnyboy

Which makes sense, as a 128KB game the double sided FDS disk was much cheaper at the time. Some sites say Metroid and Kid Icarus use the same game engine, don't know how true that is....