I mean the ones like The Legend of Zelda that saved your game without the use of passwords. How was your game saved on the cartridge? Did it work the same way as an old floppy disk?
In: Technology
The cartridge has a RAM chip dedicated just for saving your game progress, and a little watch battery just to keep that RAM powered when the NES is turned off / the game is removed from the console.
I forget which exact chip is the game-save RAM, but you can see the battery in this picture of a crystal-clear NES cartridge. It’s the silver circle on the top left of the circuit board:
/r/gaming/comments/5slkhc/
Fun fact: On the original NES consoles, you were warned to always hold the Reset button when turning off the console with a game that had save data. The original NES’s Ricoh CPU didn’t have any internal circuitry to make sure it powered off relatively gracefully, so random data could get written to random addresses when it powered off… including the game save RAM. Holding the Reset button would hold the CPU in a Reset state preventing this from happening.
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