Back when Nintendo and Sega started adding batteries to their carts for game saves and the like, they said the batteries should be good for about 5 years. Has anyone actually had a battery die on them yet? I have not...
at least not one inside of a cartridge.

The internal battery inside my awesome very great neat-o Sega Saturn has died a couple of times, and it is easily replaced. But the battery inside my two official Sega Saturn back up RAM carts are still going and still have game saves from every game I ever played on the Saturn (and I' ve played most). Some games have saves from 1997. And the battery in my Miracle Warriors (ug) cart for the Sega Master System still works. Will these batteries last longer than the planet Erath itself, or am I just lucky?

My TurboGrafx-16 CD-ROM which saves games internally has never died either. The manual says to turn on the Turbo at least once every two weeks to ensure a charge remains. But I' ve left the system off and unplugged for over a year straight and the game saves were still there and they still worked.

Okay, does anyone know what he' s talking about? I have cartridges but if anything went &^% it' s the machine it' s self.

You must be very young if you don' t remember batteries in cartridge games. Any game of that era that let you save WITHOUT a password had them, like Legend of Zelda, Phantasy Star, Phantasy Star 2, 3, 4, Super Metroid, etc etc etc.

The battery in my Saturn needs to get replaced again! Argh! But yeah it is amazing how the batteries in cartridges seem to last forever. The Saturn battery must be using technology from Earth and the ones in the cartridges are using advanced Martian technology which is why they last so long.

Zelda: Adventures of Link no longer works (1 of 2 original NES games that no longer plays) so I assume it' s the battery, but I' m only guessing.

Oh, and my SEGA Genesis doesn' t work at all.

I haven.t had a problem yet. I remember buying Pokemon Red from India (long before it was released here) to find there was no battery inside Stupid pirate game!

I HATE how power hungry VMU' s are. Thx goodness for ebay selling 100battries for £20 at the time!

btw Does leaving a cart in the slot ont he console let the battry last longer at all?

Good question. Maybe the batteries inside some carts are rechargeable? I never replace the batteries in my VMU/VMS. It still saves games just fine to the built in Flash memory. The batteries are only if you want to use it as a pretend GameBoy. It does have that long annoying beeeeeeep every time you turn on the DC if the batteries are drained, though.

I put a little switch on one of my VMU' s so I could turn that beeping off