Twitter user @Wanikun has kept his Nintendo Super Famicom (Or Super NES in the Occident) on for the past 20 years because he refused to lose his game progress in Umihara Kawase. Sure, back then, game cartridges had some integrated storage which allowed gamers to save their games, but unfortunately, the batteries keeping the storage (SRAM) “alive” eventually died.

“Incidentally, I’m pretty sure my first generation Umihara Kawase, which has been on in the SNES for over 20 years, has been in operation for over 180,000 hours. If the power is tuned off, I’ll lose all my replay data. Probably.”

Sure, the console can be unplugged/powered off for some short periods of time, such as in blackouts, but the console must be powered back on as soon as power comes back, because that battery just won’t last very long after 20 years of operation.

And for those of you who are truly desperate about keeping their saved games on game cartridge with SRAM memory, it seems that with a little bit of work, you can actually replace the battery by hot-swapping it. That trick works on old gameboy games, but I’m not sure if it could be pulled off on a live SNES cartridge!

[Source: @Wanikun | Via Rocketnews24]