Game cartridges are perhaps the hardiest of all common storage schemes. Short of blunt traumatic force or application of electrical surges to the cartridge’s edge connectors, damaging a game cartridge is hard to do by accident. The same is also true for the data on them, whether one talks about an Atari 2006 cartridge from the late 1970s or a 1990s Nintendo 64 cartridge.

The secret sauce here are mask ROMs (MROM), which are read-only memory chips that literally have the software turned into a hardware memory device. A mask layer unique to each data set is used when metalizing the interconnects during chip fabrication. This means that the data stored on them is as durable as the processor in the game console itself. Yet this is not a technology that we can use in our own hobby projects, and it’s not available for personal long-term data storage due to the costs associated with manufacturing what is essentially a custom chip.

Despite its value as truly persistent storage, MROM has fallen out of favor over the decades. You may be surprised to find a lot of what’s currently used in the consumer market is prone to data corruption over time spans as short as one year to one decade depending on environmental conditions.

So what are we to do if we need to have read-only data that should remain readable for the coming decades?

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