When you pull out the cartridge from a switch you get a message saying: „always close the software before removing the game card.“ why though? What’s the worst that could happen?

Question

When you pull out the cartridge from a switch you get a message saying: „always close the software before removing the game card.“ why though? What’s the worst that could happen?

In: 339

Answer 1

They are warning of the theoretical possibility of a partially completed write operation corrupting a file.

However, _good_ software programs take care to ensure that this won’t happen even if a write is interrupted for whatever reason, by ensuring a property we call “atomicity” in computer science. Basically that means the software can detect and recover from an interrupted write operation, such that logically it will either have fully completed or not happened at all.