Games & Preservation

Backing Up SNES Games

The Super Nintendo has the friendliest cartridges of the 16-bit era to dump — one reader even mounts them like a USB drive so backing up is literally drag-and-drop. The only wrinkle is the handful of famous games with enhancement chips inside the cartridge. As always, the ground rules come first: own it, dump it yourself, keep it private.

Media
SNES / Super Famicom cartridge.
Hardware
Retrode 2, Open Source Cartridge Reader, or INLretro.
Output
.sfc (headerless — preferred) or .smc; the OWL player accepts both.
Typical size
512 KB – 4 MB; a few late games reach 6 MB.
Save data
Battery-backed SRAM (.srm) in most RPGs — dump saves first.
A Super Nintendo Entertainment System console with controller
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Its cartridges dump cleanly over USB — some readers even make them look like a flash drive. Image: Evan-Amos, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

What You Need

Dumping, Step by Step

ROMSRAM+ sometimes a chipSNES cartridge1Retrode / OSCRcart mounts as USB drive,or dumps to microSD2Game.sfc+ Game.srm512 KB – 6 MB3OWL media libraryplays in the browser — save states synced
The SNES dump: (1) the cartridge pairs ROM with battery-backed save SRAM (and occasionally an enhancement chip), (2) the reader exposes both as files, (3) giving you Game.sfc and Game.srm. Diagram: NDEVR.
  1. Clean the edge connector with isopropyl alcohol.
  2. Insert the cartridge. Retrode: it mounts as a USB drive — copy Game.sfc and Game.srm off like any files. OSCR: choose SNES, and it writes both to the microSD card.
  3. Copy the save first, then the ROM — the save is the fragile half.
  4. Verify. Dump twice and compare, or check against the No-Intro database. Bad reads are almost always dirty contacts.

A note on formats: .sfc is the raw ROM; .smc is the same data with a 512-byte header left over from 1990s copier hardware. Modern dumpers produce clean .sfc, and the OWL player accepts either.

Special-Chip Cartridges

★

Some cartridges have a computer inside

Nintendo’s famous trick was putting co-processors in the cartridge: the SuperFX in Star Fox and Yoshi’s Island, the SA-1 in Super Mario RPG and Kirby Super Star, DSP chips in Pilotwings and Super Mario Kart. These carts wire their ROM through the chip, so a simple reader cannot always see it plainly. The OSCR explicitly supports dumping the major special-chip boards — if your shelf includes these titles, it is the reader to pick. (Emulating the chips is long solved; your dump plays fine.)

Battery Saves

Most save-capable SNES games — nearly every RPG on the platform — use battery-backed SRAM, dumped as Game.srm. The batteries are now 30+ years old; treat every surviving Chrono Trigger save as living on borrowed time, dump it, and consider a battery replacement (holders and cells are stocked by the dumper shops above, and readers can write the save back afterward).

Playing Your Backup

Upload Game.sfc to your OWL media library: the Games collection picks it up with box art and per-console emulator settings, and the SNES core runs it in the browser with save states synced across devices. Play Together puts a second controller in a friend’s hands over a share link — all from your own end-to-end encrypted storage.