If you are a still a lucky owner of a Nintendo Game Boy (the original, Color or Advance version), you should give a quick check to your games and saves to ensure they are not vanishing into oblivion.

Technical limitations & conception

Today’s save systems in games

It’s pretty common nowaday that the saves of our games to be stored locally on the device your are playing on: your computer, console or even smartphone. Depending of which one, it could also be stored on a SDCard (looking at you PSP).

Since a few years now, this way of doing getting a bit deprecated. Everything is in the TheCloudTM now.. Indeed, the cool new way to store your game saves is now the a remote system, so you can continue playing frm anywhere at anytime, exactly where your left off.

Among the free services

For a few years now, it has even been common to see services emerging that specialize in automatically sending your backups to an online storage space (Cloud), in order to ensure additional security in case of failure, breakage or loss of your machine.

Among the most popular solutions, there is the free Steam Cloud on computer or the paid Playstation Plus (on their respective platforms).

No one wants to see their hundreds of hours of play on Skyrim or Pokémon go up in smoke.

Although fairly well protected today, lost saves can happen with older platforms.

Particularity of the Game Boy backup system

The particularity of these portable consoles was that they had no storage space dedicated to our backups. The Game Boy games were sold in the form of ROM cartridges to be inserted into the back of the console.

Your saves were stored directly on these game cartridges.

Usage

If you wanted to change your game, you simply switched it with the next game.

No wonder: this was the case for a long time on computers and it is still the case for many consoles today in the form of a CD/DVD/Blu-ray (XBox, Playstation…) to insert.

However, this is less and less the case, as the current trend is to acquire games in a dematerialized way (to be downloaded and stored on your system).

Specific limitations

Depending on the game, it was sometimes impossible to create more than one savegame (i.e. one game) per cartridge. So it was possible to create a new game with a new character, or to lend your game to a friend and hope to find your main game.

Lending your Pokémon game to your little cousin (who would do that?) could quickly turn into a nightmare: it goes without saying that families had to tear themselves apart because of this. 😄

Sadly, there was never a question of adding a slot on these Game Boys in order to add a “memory card” (like Playstation did with the PS1, PS2 or PSP).

Your Game Boy saves are not safe

The problem we are facing is that the backups stored on the cartridges have a limited lifespan: about 10 to 20 years.

This is not a cold storage solution that you can decide to open once every 20 years to remember your exploits like a photo album would.

Why? Because a power source is needed to keep the saves on your game cartridges.

The technology present in the Game Boy did not allow a long term and energy free storage of your games (like today’s hard drive, SSD, SD card, DVD…).

One could think that the necessary energy came from the batteries (2 AA 1.5V batteries for the Game Boy Color) that you put in the back, but no way! Imagine that you ran out of batteries: you would have lost everything, it would have been hell.

Nintendo opted to add a button cell CR2025 (160 mAh) or CR2032 (210 mAh), which have the advantage of being very common, to the game cartridges (and only on games where backups were possible) to ensure backup was available.

When a game cartridge sees its button cell die, it is also the case for your saved games which disappear forever.

Note that it is however possible to continue saving/loading games as long as your console is switched on, but as soon as you switch it off, you will be left with a blank game.

Some preventive solutions exist

Replace the battery in your cartridges

One solution is to open your game cartridges (with a 3.8 mm safety screwdriver) to replace them.

You must then carefully remove the existing battery, without breaking the connectors holding it (you can also desolder the whole and replace it). In case the manipulation goes wrong, you will have to buy a complete battery kit… or the game.

I leave you below a video demonstrating the manipulation.

If you prefer a written tutorial, I recommend this article.

You will then have an extra twenty years to enjoy your games and your backups if you feel like it!

Migrate to an emulator

If you have already lost everything and you don’t want to take a chance by dismantling your cartridges, you can opt to turn to emulators (of course, if you own the console and the game IRL 😉).

The advantage is that your games are saved directly on your host machine and you can backup them yourself later. You have more control over your files.

Many additional advantages exist when you decide to turn to emulators: several save slots available, speedhacks, mods, networked games…

You can keep your old consoles for the collection: why not take the opportunity to give it a rag and display it at home? Isn’t she lovely?

On computer

There are very light and powerful emulators on PC running Game Boy systems, such as:

• BGB (< 500 Kb)
• DSP (2.5 Mb)
• higan (1.3 Mb)
• Gambatte (2 Mb)

On smartphone

You can even play on your smartphone! Practical when you are in the subway and you keep the portable side of your console. On Android, you can turn to applications available on the PlayStore:

• ClassicBoy
• John GBAC
• EmuBox
• GBA.emu / GBC.emu
• MyBoy / MyOldBoy

On other consoles

Other consoles (even those from a different manufacturer) can allow you to emulate Game Boy games (as well as other consoles).

For example, my latest whim was to use an old Playstation Portable Street (PSP E-1004) to play my old games again in a portable way.

I just had to flash my PSP and install some emulators (gpSP or RetroArch), the manipulation didn’t take more than ten minutes to have a working system.

I could go into details about the realization of this little project in another dedicated article. For the impatient here is a list of popular emulators available on PSP.

Recovering backups before the drama

With the purchase of adapted hardware, it is possible to recover your old backups and transfer them directly to PC.

If you are interested, you can follow this article.

Note that you have to do it BEFORE your backups are lost. 😉

Last words

I hope this article has helped you remember your old handhelds, learn more about the Game Boy savegame system, and offer solutions for those who want to keep their games.