What's the point in a Saturn memory card?

[Strider]

The only reason I've asked is because I've transfered all my saves over to it and none of my games are detecting the saves.

Do I need to turn something on or off?

[MD]

Some games don't detect the memory card, so you'll need to copy them back to the internal memory.

One good point of it is so you can save lots of games if the internal memory is full and replace the battery without losing all the game data.

It's flash memory so it holds data longer then the Saturn internal memory does...

[Strider]

Cheers MD

I''ve got it all set up via one of those Action replay carts, so I can simply swop the games around before I play.

[Kubrick]

It's very handy for keeping your big files like NiGHTS and VF2 on.

[randombs]

Strider, are you using an Action Replay as your memory card? If so, then issue you're experiencing is due to the way the Action Replay works.

A normal Saturn memory card would be recognised by the games, but the Action Replay is not - think of it as an archiving device, rather than a memory card.
You have to copy saves to/from it using the Action Replay menu, so in reality you're still utilising your internal RAM, and that's all the games see.

So, for example, you can't save your ghost car in Sega Rally as you'd need the actual memory card to do it, which you can't do with the AR.

Basically, an AR FAQ that I read states that the Saturn recognises two types of cart - memory and other. if it recognises the AR as memory, then it'd only work as a memory card. if it recognises it as other (which it does), then it allows the AR to boot the Saturn, achieving the multi-region booting, and cheats.

Reason I'm saying this is because you've said none of your games are detecting the card. Surely you're bound to have a few games that support it (i.e. Sega Rally)

[Arctic Feather]

I use it for backing up my save files in case the battery for the internal memory runs out

[randombs]

yeah so do i. the cool thing (or annoying thing depending how you look at it) is that the action replay can save different versions of the same file - although it retains the name so you'd need to know which is which.

for example - say you complete a game and want to do it again, you could save your completed game file on the AR, then start afresh (by deleting it from the saturn internal ram). then, when you save your new game and copy it to the AR, it won't overwrite the old file and then you have a backup of both. but then they'd both have the same name and there is no date stamp or anything so it could get messy...