Last week I fired up a 26-year-old copy of Pokémon Pinball, one of the best Game Boy games ever made. My save file no longer existed. The Charmander I’d caught for my daughter, the high scores we’d set together… disappeared. Before flash memory, Nintendo cartridges used small clock batteries to store their games, and those batteries were never supposed to last that long. But it’s not a big deal, because I saved my family’s save file months ago. I backed it up with an Epilogue Operator, a device that connects your actual Nintendo cartridges to Windows PCs, MacBooks, and even a Steam Machine. The $50GB Operator is a transparent keystone cartridge reader that reads and writes to real Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance cartridges via a USB-C cable; The company’s new $60 SN Operator does the same for Super Nintendo and Japanese Super Famicom titles. Epilogue also comes with an N64 version. They’re not just for backups! As you can see in my embedded video, these devices can also play your carts. My Xbox Ally now accepts Super Nintendo cartridges, my Steam Deck plays Game Boy carts, and my phone is a Game Boy camera, because I connected an epilogue operator to each. (Double-sided magnetic rings and mechanism holders helped.) Technically, the SN Operator and GB Operator are just cartridge readers, there are no original Nintendo chips or FPGAs inside. When you play games, your computer saves the ROM to your computer and plays it in an emulator. But Epilogue’s Playback software makes it easy: Just plug in the reader, plug in the cart, press play, and it creates a convincing illusion that you’re playing on real carts. Plug one in and your game will appear on the screen. Every time you save the game, Epilogue should also automatically save it to your cartridge. Every time you pull a cart, the game instantly disappears. The SN Operator, with a large slot to fit an SNES or Super Famicom cartridge (and spring-loaded door covers on top). The GB Operator, about a quarter the size of the SN Operator. The latter is a double-edged sword, because Epilogue Operators can be picky about detecting cartridges. They are not as forgiving as a real Super Nintendo or Game Boy if your carts are slightly dirty or damaged. I have Japanese copies of Bahamut Lagoon and Sailor Moon R that will quit mid-session if I push them wrong. But I love being able to write saves to my cartridges: I can play a game on my PC, move the cartridge to my Steam Deck, then insert it into a real original Game Boy or Super Nintendo and pick up where I left off. If you don’t need to write auto saves, you can even switch to an emulator core that offers RetroAchievements, plus optional conveniences like saving anywhere in a game with save states or the ability to rewind time and try that tricky jump one more time. Super Nintendo on an Xbox Ally? Yes. Do you want to hear something especially nerdy? My family recently played Super Metroid on the Super Famicom Classic Edition that Nintendo released in 2017, and there’s actually a way to pull your saves from those emulator consoles as well. I converted and wrote that save to my Japanese Super Metroid cartridge, and now I’m playing that save on original Nintendo hardware from 30 years ago. (Speaking of: did you know that a Japanese copy of Super Metroid is downright affordable and completely in English?) (I hooked up the SN Operator with a mechanism stand and some right-angle USB-C adapters. I never had a Super Nintendo growing up, and now I don’t have a Super Scope light gun or a working SNES mouse. But the SN Operator is also helping me play awesome games like Metal Combat: Falcon’s Revenge and Mario Paint and share them with my kids, no need to creaky old peripherals. There’s an option to let your PC’s mouse cursor emulate a light gun or mouse, and it was easy to map them to my Steam Controller’s gyroscope by pairing emulators with other hardware, including the open-source cartridge reader and a variety of Game Boy readers, the Epilogue’s hardware is surprisingly high-quality considering its low cost, with attractive minimalist circuit boards clearly visible through the sleek polycarbonate. You know how much we love our transparent devices. Here’s the back of the GB Operator. Photo by Sean Hollister / The VergeAnd Epilogue doesn’t just rely on emulator developers. While the hardware is proprietary, the Romanian company contributes some money and some code to open source emulators, and each SN Operator has its own factory-calibrated clock speeds so they can download certain SNES games without bugs. connect real cars to your phone, and it even created its own Flashback app if you want to turn your phone into a Game Boy camera. The 3D trapezoidal prism shape of the Operator doesn’t exactly lend itself to portability, but I attached a magnetic ring to it perfectly. With all these awesome features, I think the Epilogue should be a little more You should know the limitations: the Operators don’t work with multi-game flash cards, they don’t work with the Super Game Boy, and their highly marketed “Counterfeit Cartridge Detection” has. It’s been very unpredictable in my testing, to the point that I wouldn’t really trust it. The company advertises that it can turn your Game Boy camera into a webcam, but it’s more of an OBS screen recording trick than I would have imagined. And if you, like me, have original Game Boy cartridges with original batteries, it may already be too late to save some of your game saves. their backup batteries and they might not have lasted more than a decade. As for the first generation Game Boy games, I took a Charmander out of an original Pokémon Red cart last year, but even those carts are reaching the end of their life. I have a 30 year old copy of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening whose battery was running last month, I discovered that its save was also gone. Fortunately, GB Operator backed up my progress a few months ago. new, update my save file, and I’ll be back in business. Follow this story’s topics and authors to see more like this on your personalized home page and receive email updates. 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