Game Boy Save Immortalizer

The Game Boy and Game Boy Color have countless wonderful games, but they all have one fatal flaw: their save memory is powered by a battery.

15-or-so years after a Game Boy cartridge was manufactured, its battery runs out, and the save file on it disappears into the ether. The ability to create new saves disappears with it, giving all Game Boy games a finite shelf life. Your Pokémon friends from your childhood, your 100% cleared Wario Land III, your "I'll finish it someday" Link's Awakening save file… all gone.

But no longer. This mod replaces the SRAM save chip in your cartridge with nonvolatile FRAM – a type of memory that doesn't need power to keep its data – thus making your save file effectively immortal! Even when the battery runs out, your save file – and in the case of Pokémon, your Pokémon friends – will be just fine, ready to spend the rest of time with you.

Installation instructions here!

10% off orders of 3 or more; 20% off orders of 10 or more!

Would you like your cartridge immortalized for you? If the boards are in stock, send me a DM on Twitter @obskyr and you may be able to commission me to mod your cartridges for you!

Versions

Two versions of the kit are available. The “omnicompatible” version works with every cartridge the mod is compatible with (see below). The other, while cheaper, is incompatible with the Nintendo 64 Transfer Pak, and should thus not be used with games that support it (e.g. Pokémon) – but is just as great an option for other games.

Important notes

• The package includes 1) a compatible FRAM chip, and 2) a “signal swizzler” daughter board.
• The mod requires some tools and finesse – to see if it looks doable, see the guide!
• One size fits nearly all: compatible with all MBC1, MBC3, and MBC5 cartridges (~98% of games)! Don't know if your game applies? Open it up with a 3.8 mm line-drive (AKA “game bit”) screwdriver and see if there's a chip labeled with any of those.
• Compatible with all Gen Ⅰ and Gen Ⅱ Pokémon games! Except Japanese Pokémon Crystal, specifically, which uses a different memory chip.
• The omnicompatible version is compatible with all official hardware! May be incompatible with unofficial hardware that doesn't mimic a Game Boy well enough (e.g. Retrode, GB01, SmartBoy…). A version incompatible with the Nintendo 64 Transfer Pak (and thus Pokémon) is also offered.
• If the game has an RTC (a real-time clock), the battery is still required to run that – but the save will still be fine when it runs out. If not, the battery can be removed!
• Not compatible with Game Boy Advance games – those tend to already have nonvolatile saves anyway.
• “Immortal” is a bit theatrical – the FRAM does have a finite lifespan, as the march of entropy dictates. It's just really, really long!
• It's called a “Game Boy”, not a “Gameboy”! …Okay, this point is just for SEO.
• The first image is a serving suggestion! Cartridge not included.

Acknowledgements

I must give immense thanks to the retro hardware community for coming up with the concept of an FRAM mod and discovering this particular FRAM chip, to gbatemp user wadeVillines for his hard work having already solved a bunch of the MBC3 problems I thought I'd have to solve myself, and to Game Boy legend gekkio for advice and testing the exact behavior of the cartridge bus's clock pin during DMA. And thank you, for-a playing my game.