Hold RESET while you turn POWER off-NES question

[emekthian]

I am slightly too young to have been playing video games in the NES era, although I have been playing some NES games with my emulator. Recently, I've been playing Final Fantasy 1. In this game, after you save at an inn, the innkeeper gives you the message, "Don't forget, if you leave your game, remember to hold RESET while you turn POWER off". Like I said earlier, I wasn't playing video games in the '80s, and it baffles me why it's neccessary to hold reset when turning the power off. Could someone explain this? And what would happen if you just turned the power off, without holding reset?

[Achernar]

I believe all that happened was you lost your save game. I was under the impression that the reason for this is that pressing the POWER button disconnected the power from the system, whereas pressing the RESET button sent a signal to the cartridge to reset, rather than interrupting power. There were some games you could reset with the controller by hitting some set of buttons, like A B Select Down or something like that.

[Joey P]

IIRC you had to do that in Zelda to or something would get screwed up.

[psychomonkey]

Oy, this makes me feel old, and Im only in college. Final Fantasy has whats called SRAM, a tiny tiny tiny bit of memory in the cartridge that is battery supplied (at least so I was told back then, Im not so sure now...). Anyway, not all games had this, the first popular game to have it was The Legend of Zelda (Classic Gold cartridge, of course). Mainly RPGs had it, but there were a few others. As far as the mechanics go, basically you would just turn the power off in most games and power was immediately cut to the cartridge, no harm done. Butwhen SRAM enters the picture, the cartridge needs to be set back to its original state before you turn it off so that you have the chance to save. Note that not all games function this way, and If I remember right, it had something to do with the way FFs memory worked, as I dont remember ever having t do that with Zelda. Other games used a password system, where you'd get a crazy long password to right down in orded toget to that spot. Since not all games used items and the like, it worked perfectly.

[psychomonkey]

I just realized that that k stands for kilobits, not kilobytes. Im not sure how to abbreviate those things.

[Kamino Neko]

Originally Posted by psychomonkey

Note that not all games function this way, and If I remember right, it had something to do with the way FFs memory worked, as I dont remember ever having t do that with Zelda.

Zelda did, in fact, require it. As did Dragon Warrior. Neither of them reminded you in-game, though.

[Jeep's Phoenix]

Originally Posted by psychomonkey

Oy, this makes me feel old, and Im only in college. Final Fantasy has whats called SRAM, a tiny tiny tiny bit of memory in the cartridge that is battery supplied (at least so I was told back then, Im not so sure now...).

Yep...I've seen a few of those cartridges disassembled; the battery is a button-style battery, about the size of a backup battery in a graphing calculator. Evidently, they have a very long life--my NES Legend of Zelda game still saves data.

[Quint Essence]

It is only a suggestion to hold the reset button in. The game saves when you go to the save screen but occassionally a small spike would reset the memory when you power off.
Later cartridges (all games that had an actual "save" used a battery backup, otherwise you used codes to get back to levels) were better protected against those spikes so they do not have that reminder.
Nintendo did not find out about the problem with the power spikes until after several hundred thousand of the Zelda games had shipped. The reset button basically cuts the power to the cartridge and prevents any spike from passing through when shutting off the main power.

[emekthian]

Thanks for the info. Are battery backup systems still used for saving games, or do cartriges now have non-volitile memory?

[Hauky]

I don't know about cartridges like the Game Boy Advance, but I think memory cards for consoles are now purely non-volatile memory, similar to the memory cards for digital cameras and the like. However, for example, the N64's memory cards were battery powered--but the cartridges with internal memory contained EEPROM chips. (phew)

[Duderdude2]

Originally Posted by emekthian

Thanks for the info. Are battery backup systems still used for saving games, or do cartriges now have non-volitile memory?

"Cartridges" (I presume you're reffering to GBA games, as they're the only cartridges I can think of) now use something called EEPROM (Electrically-Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory) to save games. It's a non-volatile storage device which can be rewritten copious times, though there is a limit of 100,000 to 1,000,000 (more than the average user would ever need).

[Ichinisan]

Originally Posted by Hauky

I don't know about cartridges like the Game Boy Advance, but I think memory cards for consoles are now purely non-volatile memory, similar to the memory cards for digital cameras and the like. However, for example, the N64's memory cards were battery powered--but the cartridges with internal memory contained EEPROM chips. (phew)

Some N64 games used EEPROM. Others use SRAM+Battery (Zelda:OoT is one of them). Still others use a different type of EEPROM that is sometimes referred to as "FlashRAM" (Super Smash Bros is an example of this).

I believe GBA games also had mixed save types...but I can't think of any specific examples. I remember examining a pirate copy of Super Mario World: Super Mario Advance 2 and noting that it had an SRAM battery while a real cartridge had some kind of EEPROM (no battery).

[samclem]

When this thread was started(2004), we ddn't have a GAme Room. Now we do. Moved from GQ to GR.

samclem, Moderator

[Michael63129]

I know this is an old thread, but the reason you have to hold in Reset is to prevent the CPU from doing anything when you power down because power isn't lost instantly; capacitors have to discharge and during this time the CPU gets invalid operating voltages which can cause it to operate erratically, thus holding it in reset prevents any operation during this time (the same thing is done in PCs, except it is automatic).

[Derleth]

Originally Posted by psychomonkey

I just realized that that k stands for kilobits, not kilobytes. Im not sure how to abbreviate those things.

No, kb stands for kilobits, kB for kilobytes. And remember that, when measuring RAM, kilo- means "multiply by 1024", unless someone's trying to screw you over.

And this is just as true now as it was in 2004, and I don't care if psychomonkey is still active.

[Jragon]

Originally Posted by Derleth

No, kb stands for kilobits, kB for kilobytes. And remember that, when measuring RAM, kilo- means "multiply by 1024", unless someone's trying to screw you over.

And this is just as true now as it was in 2004, and I don't care if psychomonkey is still active.

Or they're the anal folks who insist that "kilobibyte" is the correct terminology.

[fusoya]

The power system in the original NES was very sensitive. I used to lose my saved games by doing things like throeing the controller, which would make the system jump and send a spike. The worst tragedy was with Ultima 4 where I was in the FINAL DUNGEON when my house had a power outage, and when it came back.....freshly erased game.

Anyway, the holding reset technique was to cut the power flow from the cartridge while the system shut down. MOST of the time, just hitting power didn't do anything, but I have lost saved games (Final Fantasy was especially bad) by not using the reset technique.

Note the redesigned toploader NES did not have these problems.