I'm pretty sure
Beyond Oasis has a save feature. It's an action RPG.
The Sonic 3 cart has a non-volatile memory inside, a RAMTRON FRAM.
DinnerX wrote:That number is really, really high. Thousands and thousands of times.
One could replace the chip years from now when it wears out. It'd be a bit more of a pain than replacing a battery though.
Higher than thousands and thousands. I once looked up the datasheet for the exact model RAMTRON chip inside the Sonic 3 cart and noticed that the amount of read/writes was ridiculously high. I'm too lazy to find out the model number right now though.
People always make NV RAM sound bad by saying it will eventually burn out. While that's true, it's not really a concern. The SRAM in your carts that need a battery, they're rated for a certain number of reads and writes as well. People make solid state hard drives sound really bad, but as I've read, they should actually outlive your RAM. And really, when was the last time you had your RAM burn out (not counting defected parts).
Anyways, yes, the Sonic 3 RAMTRON chips are very replaceable. I read a thread where a guy contacted RAMTRON with the part number for the FRAM inside Sonic 3 and asked for a replacement. They told him that part is very old and no longer made (go figure) but gave him the part number of a currently sold FRAM that was compatible. He bought one, installed it, worked perfectly.
And since the FRAM is designed to be compatible with SRAM, you can actually use SRAM for a Sonic 3 cart. I was doing a little testing / messing around once, I put the Sonic 3 mask ROM on another cart that uses a battery backed SRAM. The game saved fine.
But yeah, a little more work than replacing a battery. Usually a soldering noob can replace a battery pretty easily, but I wouldn't recommend trying to replace a 32-pin DIP component. For some one like me though, it's a very simple task.
ZeroAX wrote:Then I must be really unlucky, cause I bought a cartridge from ebay that could not save.
Also I tried buying a replacement chip and turns out it would cost about as much as buying another Sonic 3 cartridge, so yeah....
It would have been worth it to replace it. I just looked at
the datasheet for a new RAMTROM chip, it has a data retention of 38 years. That means you can go at
least 38 years in between saving the game. It also has 100 trillion read/write cycles. What that basically means is that this chip will never fail in your life time. Even if you manage to play it a million times a day for the rest of your life. Or you could save the game and shelf it for 40 years.
As for being unlucky, I think it's just that. It happens. Could have been a manufacturing defect, or the cart might not have seen the best conditions.
From what I've seen so far, most NV RAM chips seem to be around $20. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have to go with RAMTRON either. Like I said, Sonic 3 saved using battery backed SRAM. So any NV memory that's compatible as SRAM should work fine.
Ah, this reminds me, I wanted to mod a SNES cart with NV RAM.
