Why are cartridges so varied in size?

[Ziggy]

*EA carts*
I've opened one or two up before. If I remember correctly, the PCB looked identical to a regular cased Genesis PCB.

They do. It's just annoying to pop off the yellow tab without breaking it and EA used at least 3 different types of screws. One kind was 3 points around the outside of the screw head.

Last time I opened an EA cart I didn't even take that yellow tab thing off. Just got the screws out and slid the PCB out. And I know that screw you're talking about, with the 3 points on it. That was a nightmare. Luckily though, one of the screws I was able to take a small flat head and break the points off then the normal security bit worked on it. I don't recall how I got the second one out though.

[Mod_Man_Extreme]

Actually the majority of mid-late GBA and all DS games use flash ROM for storing your progress inside of a game while the game program itself is stored on a traditional Mask ROM.

The GameBor color even had some late-era games that used flash ROM to save progress, Kirby Tilt and Tumble is one of the more notable releases which did so.

I believe flash memory is a kind of eeprom. Maybe most people don't refer to it as eeprom. Though it is still technically Electronically Erasable Programable Read Only Memory.

I thought most GBA games used it. Didn't know any GBC games used it. That's pretty cool. Well, by my standard of cool.

EEPROM and flash are similar in operation in that they are re-writeable memory but operate in incredibly different technologies and concepts. Jut becaue the definition of EEPROM is the same as the function of flash does not make it an actual EEPROM and is very important to take into account.