Week 7: Console-era preservation

How cartridge dumping and BIOS emulation work, read from existing dumps and archives rather than requiring hardware of your own

19 April 2027

Console preservation has its own vocabulary — cartridge dumping, BIOS emulation, region locking, save-battery decay — and this week covers how each of those works, without asking you to own a flash cart or a soldering iron. Owning the hardware helps if you already have it, but it is not a prerequisite for this course: existing dumps and preservation-community archives are enough to work with a console-era artifact at the depth this course asks for.

The point isn’t to make everyone a hardware hobbyist. It’s to understand why a console dump is trustworthy evidence (or isn’t) when you find one — what a checksum tells you, what a bad dump usually looks like, and why a battery-backed save can die years before the cartridge that holds it does.

Outline#

• what dumping a cartridge actually captures, in principle
• BIOS emulation and why it matters for accuracy
• judging whether a dump you didn’t make yourself is trustworthy
• reading an archive’s provenance notes like part of the evidence