Game Genie and save features

[socram8888]

Based on what the Wikipedia says:

Sega, on the other hand, fully endorsed the product with their official seal of approval. One of Sega's requirements for this was that the Game Genie would not work with games that have a save feature, such as the Phantasy Star and Shining Force series.

and in my experience with a Game Genie and a NBA Live 97 cartridge: is there any way to bypass this block?

The GameGenie isn't blocking writes to cart's address, because games like Virtual Racing (which uses writes to control the SVP) or Super Street Fighter (which uses writes to control memory mapping) works perfectly

[jlf65]

It's not that it's not allowed to work, it has to do with how save memory works on the Genesis. SEGA's standard for save memory has the game write an enable/disable value to 0xA130F1; when enabled, the space above 0x200000 is now save ram, not rom. The GG has no way to deal with this, so it will interfere with writes to save memory if it's turned on. You CAN use the GG with those games you mentioned, they just won't save correctly if you use GG codes with them. The GG could have had a hardware update (GameGenie 2? ) so that when a game wrote to 0xA130F1, the GameGenie turned itself off/on with the save memory on/off to allow the save memory to work while using GG codes.

[Tiido]

you probably only have to cut a trace and solder 2 wires to get saves working for all games, unless there's timing issues which will corrupt the saves. Maybe only write line is disconnected

[jlf65]

If VR works, I can't imagine the write line not being connected, but I don't know everything about the GG. Anyone aware of any schematics for it?

[Tom Maneiro]

We can start with a PCB scan... i don't want to ruin the sticker of my GG because the pesky screws are underneath...