Gaming With the game saves on cartridge

[tiamat999]

Do they still corrupt from turning off in the middle of saving? Would suck to lose those hundreds of hours on games because of a brain fart moment

 

[KleinesSinchen]

Do they still corrupt from turning off in the middle of saving? Would suck to lose those hundreds of hours on games because of a brain fart moment

Most games are pretty good handling this. Since Game Boy Advance (at least) games often have their save twice.
Saving 1st time → first slot
Saving 2nd time →second slot
Saving 3rd time →first slot
Saving 4th time →second slot
.
.
.
while noting which slot contains the latest save. They use checksums to ensure the save is valid. If you turn off in the middle of saving and corrupt the save in this slot, next time the game should present you something like "Save corrupted: Previous state loaded." making you effectively lose only a small amount of playing time.

However: There is no guarantee this will work! Total save corruption can happen any time for no reason at all – although it has become much better since the "Hold in the Reset button while turning off the power." on most NES games with battery powered SRAM chips.

Even rapidly turning on and off does not erase later SRAM based save functions and I had a hard time trying deliberately corrupting my save on Pokemon Gelbe Edition (Yellow) by turning off the Game Boy while saving.

Since you asked in the 3DS forum: For DS and 3DS games… If you have CFW or at least homebrew running on a 2|3DS you can backup your saves with Checkpoint and/or JKSM – the latter one works without CFW if I remember correctly.

For 3DS games installed on the micro-(SD) backing up is possible by simply backing up the SD:/Nintendo 3DS folder but only if the games do not use anti-cheat/anti-save-restore.