Talk:Game backup device

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Backup Device not a neologism

Articles on 'backup devices' are not unprecedented on Wikipedia. CD64 (Nintendo), Z64, Doctor V64, Game Boy Advance flash cartridge, Nintendo DS storage devices, Bung Enterprises, to name a few, all deal with backup devices in some way, shape or form. AS for third party sources, at the very least a cursory google search brings up numerous articles about Nintendo's battle with the creators of the R4. Nintendo's battle with Bung Enterprises is also well documented. Since 'backup device' isn't a neologism, and that's the only objection to this article I'm going to remove the delete template. If anyone has any concerns about this, please direct them here. --Thaddius (talk) 15:38, 28 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think I understand. Thanks for the clarification. I won't bring push it any further. MuZemike (talk) 15:53, 28 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Worked on the article a tad

I tried to fix things up a little. I decided to shift it from a listing of every device known, to a brief description of the types of backup devices there are with one or two examples. Still need a lot of work though. --Thaddius (talk) 17:35, 29 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

8-bit computers

History-wise, the article completely misses out the equivalent devices for the 8 and 16-bit computers of the 1980s. An obvious one would be the Multiface series of devices, made by Romantic Robot. These were mostly useful for dumping the machine's memory onto storage media.

In Europe, most 8-bit games came on cassette tape. A computer might not even have an official disk drive, or might have several equally-popular third-party ones. Very few of these disk or floppy tape drives had commercial games released on their format. Games came on audio cassette, and could take half an hour to load. Backup devices were used with your disk drive, usually by triggering the computer's CPU's interrupt line, then swapping the device's own ROM and RAM into the computer's address space. From there routines could run to save the CPU and hardware registers, and the contents of the computer's RAM, to whichever disk format you owned.

There were several competing disk, and floppy tape, drives for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad, etc. The Multiface and it's like would usually support half a dozen or so of them. To load the game back in, a short program saved to disk would load the data and registers back into the computer, then jump to the instruction the game was running before it was interrupted. To the computer it was as if nothing had happened. For the user it was a pretty foolproof way of saving any game.

By saving "snapshots" like this, it also gave a save-game feature to all games, usable at any time. There were also programs that would load into the device to allow cheating, like the Game Genie. Datel's Action Replay is a very similar device that also started on 8-bit home computers, now with versions for some modern consoles.

The main use wasn't usually piracy. It was getting games to run from your expensive disk drive, instead of waiting for cassette tape.

Anyway, I ramble. The information's all out there. My point is why isn't it mentioned here? In Europe and many other places, the NES didn't take off at all in the 1980s. Kids played on real 8-bit computers instead. Then the Atari ST and Amiga came out, and after that the Mega Drive and eventually, the SNES. The ST had a Multiface too!

188.29.165.202 (talk) 22:55, 19 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

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