![]() ![]() Magnetic storage is among the easiest to read and (re)write, which is why magnetic tape, floppy discs and hard drives were or are the storage medium of choice in a number of areas.įinally, there are the ‘blink and it’s gone’ types of memories, such as SRAM and (S)DRAM, which require a constant source of power to keep their data intact. Some types can be written to repeatedly, such as EPROM (where the former requires UV light to erase the contents) and EEPROM, where the additional ‘E’ means it can be erased with an electrical current. The ‘M’ in ROM (Memory) comes in a variety of types MROM is in the ‘one time programmable’ category along with PROM. The Many Flavors of Total Recall Mask ROM ICs next to a die shot. So what are we to do if we need to have read-only data that should remain readable for the coming decades? ![]() You may be surprised to find a lot of what’s currently used in the consumer market is prone to data corruption over time spans as short as one year to one decade depending on environmental conditions. Yet this is not a technology that we can use in our own hobby projects, and it’s not available for personal long-term data storage due to the costs associated with manufacturing what is essentially a custom chip.ĭespite its value as truly persistent storage, MROM has fallen out of favor over the decades. This means that the data stored on them is as durable as the processor in the game console itself. ![]() A mask layer unique to each data set is used when metalizing the interconnects during chip fabrication. ![]() The secret sauce here are mask ROMs (MROM), which are read-only memory chips that literally have the software turned into a hardware memory device. The same is also true for the data on them, whether one talks about an Atari 2006 cartridge from the late 1970s or a 1990s Nintendo 64 cartridge. Short of blunt traumatic force or application of electrical surges to the cartridge’s edge connectors, damaging a game cartridge is hard to do by accident. Game cartridges are perhaps the hardiest of all common storage schemes. ![]()
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