Why do video game cartridges and motherboards need a battery to maintain save data but a simple SD card does not?
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Around the 80/90s era, reprogrammable flash memory was still very expensive, even in the small sizes needed for game saves.
It was often cheaper to include a small amount of battery powered RAM inside the game cartridge, but this also meant that the failure of that battery would result in the loss of the game save data.
Over time (especially around the game boy advance era), flash memory became cheap enough that it was practical to use in game cartridges).
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