Another Pokemon Silver game, revived by yours truly.

Damn. I used to have pokemon silver but once you turned off your gameboy the save can't be continued. so i do speedrun on it within a day and that when i fell inlove on the game.

HeartGold is my favorite iteration of the game, but the Gameboy version of Gold was what I sank most of my free time into during Job Corps. Back in 2003, there weren't any good Gameboy mods out there, so I was stuck with the original screen and an LED worm light, but it worked out fine for back then.

I used to try to speedrun Pokémon Yellow and Silver, because of the battery issue. It was fun and stressful at the same time.

The last time you could legitimately completely max out your Pokémon's stats...sigh. EVs are just too limiting, man, with that 510 cap (the max number of EVs any one Pokémon can have is 510, no matter how that's spread across your stats). 1512 is just better, and unfortunately the only game with a 510-cap removal patch is Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness.

That's great!

I still have a legit copy of both Gold and Silver. However, the batteries are long gone and, as I didn't change them yet, I can't save.

Same with my Pokémon Ruby and Emerald for the GBA.

But I actually need to improve my soldering skills before I do anything.

This image brings such joy to me. I had always wanted to back up my save files so that when the batteries died, I could replace them and my saves would still be safe. I had Gold from my childhood and Crystal from, at the time, more recently (though it was literally 3 years after I had gotten Gold - in hindsight that's basically the same time but back then it felt like a much bigger gap in time).

In July of 2013, I took pictures of EVERY. SINGLE. THING. in my copy of Pokemon Gold so as to preserve it that way. Every page of the pokedex, every stats page of my party pokemon, all my pc pokemon pages (no stats), and the stats pages of all my legendaries. Altogether, 313 pictures taken on my DSi.

Then in December of that year, I got a Mega Memory Card (MMC), which is a device that allows you to plug your game into it while plugged into the system (like lock-on technology with Sonic 3 & Knuckles except in a Z formation so it didn't stick out really far).

I already had a GB USB 64M Smart Card at that point (a flash cart with a USB Mini port on it to flash games onto, could officially support 1 save file game at a time and had a second page for non-saving games) so when I got the MMC I went right down to business and backed up my save from my copy of Gold and Crystal, which still held their saves somehow (the batteries had never been replaced). I backed it up from the game to the MMC, then restored it from the MMC to my flash cart, at which point I restored it to my laptop via USB cable. Lo and behold, I had preserved my most cherished childhood memories! Backed them up on every single device I had, including my Wii's SD card (it sure is easy to throw 32KB files in as many places as you can), all my DS flashcards, everything that could hold data. I will NEVER lose these save files!

Best part, if I check my games' batteries now and they're finally dead, I can replace them and then restore my save file back onto them.