Someone Else’s Save File

I bought my copy of Chrono Trigger used, years ago, from a shop that sold old games in plastic bags with handwritten price tags. When I got home and switched it on, two of the three save slots were empty. The third one was not.

Someone had renamed the hero to something I won’t print here: five letters, the kind of name you choose at ten when you’re sure nobody else will ever see it. Their party was level 38. The clock said forty-one hours and seven minutes. They had come very close to the end and then, for whatever reason, stopped.

I never overwrote that file. For years I played in slot one, finished the game twice, and every time I opened the load screen there it was: a stranger’s afternoons, frozen in place.

Why saves die

Here is what nobody tells you at ten: the game on a cartridge is close to permanent, but the save is not. The program lives in mask ROM, which is about as near to carved stone as consumer electronics get. Your progress lives somewhere far more fragile — a small static RAM chip that forgets everything the instant it loses power.

What keeps it powered is a coin cell, usually a CR2032, soldered to the board. It has been feeding that chip a tiny trickle of current every second since the cartridge left the factory. Every cartridge with a battery save is a countdown, and most of them have been counting for thirty years.

This autumn I read one too many forum threads that began with “my save is gone” and finally opened the cartridge. The screws need a 3.8 mm security bit, the same one that opens most cartridges from that era, plus a little patience with the plastic clips. My multimeter read 2.6 volts. A fresh cell measures a little over three. Not dead, but not young either.

Three ways to rescue a save

The first way is to do nothing and hope. That is what I had been doing for years, and it is a perfectly human strategy right up until the day it fails.

The second is the hot swap: solder the new battery in place before removing the old one, so the memory never loses power. People do it successfully all the time. People also slip with a soldering iron all the time.

The third is to make a backup first. A cheap USB cartridge reader can copy the save memory to a file on a computer. It is a few kilobytes, far smaller than the photo I took of the open cartridge. Once the save exists somewhere else, the battery stops being frightening and becomes just another part.

I chose the third. The reader copied the save, I checked the file in an emulator, and there it was: slot three, level 38, 41:07. Then I desoldered the old cell, fitted a new CR2032 with pre-welded tabs (never solder directly onto the body of a coin cell; the heat is bad for it), closed the shell and wrote the save back.

When I turned the console on, the load screen looked exactly as it always had. That was the whole point.

A diary I only read the cover of

I didn’t load the stranger’s file. I thought about it. I wondered where they had stopped, which side quests they had done, whether they had left the party somewhere meaningful or just at whatever save point happened to be nearby. Loading it would have felt like reading someone’s diary because the lock was broken. So I only read the cover, as I always have.

What I keep thinking about is how much of my own childhood is gone in exactly this way. Not the games — I could buy most of them again — but the files. The names I typed. The levels I was proud of. The forty hours. They lived in little chips kept alive by little batteries, and one by one the batteries stopped.

Why this journal exists

This journal is my attempt at a save file that doesn’t depend on a coin cell. I want to write down the slow, unimportant things: which games I keep returning to, what an old television sounds like as it warms up, how a 16×16 icon gets drawn one pixel at a time, which soundtrack I put on when the evenings get dark early.

Entries will be irregular. Some months I’ll be too busy playing to write. If you would like to know when a new one appears, there is an RSS feed — no accounts, no comments, nothing to sign up for. Just pages, like the old instruction manuals.

Pull up a chair. The battery is fresh.