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Hey all, hoping for a bit of advice.

I wanted to do a run of Zelda:LttP on SNES recently, last time I played it was around 6-8 months ago and all was fine at the time, saved, no glitches, was working great. Fast forward to today and I popped the cart back in to find all my saves gone (ouch, my childhood) and unable to start a new game. When I go to enter a name I get a garbled mess or glitchy looking character and it never lets me begin the game.

I tried swapping out the battery but in my clumsiness I snapped one of the tabs that holds the blasted thing in place, already ordered some batteries with the tabs pre-soldered. Just for kicks I tried the game again without a battery and got the same results, glitched sprites instead of letters and no way to start the game and just play through without being able to save.

My question is this: Is that normal? I would figure I should be able to enter a name and start a file even without a battery and just lose it when the system is powered off. I'm worried that even if I replace the battery that there's something else that could be seriously wrong with the cartridge. The tabs are as clean as could be and it's been well maintained and confirmed working within the last year...

Let me know if anything like this has been seen, it's probably going to be a week or so before I get the battery I need and don't know if there's any other tests I could do to at least know the game is good before then.

If the glitchiness had gone away when the battery was totally removed as if it had broken saves that were barely holding with the nearly dead battery, that would be good. If you take it out and leave it alone for at least 15 minutes and put it back in, the glitches stay? That should be good enough to know that the memory had discharged completely. Under normal circumstances other than a dead battery, it would play fine, just obviously be blank if turned off.

Some games just plain act funky when the battery is dead.

Super Metroid for example will give you files that, instead of saying "new game", will just be a normal file with 00:00 Time and 00 Energy. When you try and start it, you get the usual opening stuff, but as soon as you get control of Samus she instantly dies because her energy is already at 0.

So yeah, hopefully something like that is what's going on here. Maybe once you replace that battery the problem will go away.

Thanks for the replies, I let the cartridge sit out of the SNES all night and tried it again just now... Names are entering normally again! Despite the battery not being in the corrupt saves must have still remained for a while longer, guess it was incorrect of me to assume pulling the battery would instantly wipe the saves out.

Now to just wait for the replacement pins to arrive. Thanks for the help.

Awesome. I'd totally forgotten about AQs Super Metroid experience, but yeah, the memory will fade out over a little bit of time, not just instantly blink out. Some bits of the information might fade faster than others, so if power returns before it is all gone or if there isn't some sort of start up blanking signal like PC RAM where it expects to start fresh each boot, you can end up with a little garbage.