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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.
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
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:
HOLD THE START BUTTON DOWN and turn your console on. Make sure to HOLD THE START BUTTON DOWN while it boots up. This will pull up the data management screen where you can view and delete your stored data on your memory card.
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