Nintendo Power (cartridge)

The Nintendo Power (Japanese: ニンテンドーパワー, Hepburn: Nintendō Pawā^?) flash RAM cartridge is a Japan-only peripheral which was produced by Nintendo for the Super Famicom and the Game Boy. The now defunct service allowed owners to download Super Famicom and Game Boy games onto a special flash memory cartridge for a lower price than that of the full cartridge.

A similar system of rewritable kiosk distribution had previously been used with the Famicom Disk Writer kiosks of the 1980s. Nintendo deployed another dynamic flash storage subsystem on the Satellaview peripheral of the late 1990s, for delivering a different set of unique Super Famicom games via the now defunct St.GIGA satellite network. In 2003, Nintendo launched another game delivery kiosk network for the iQue Player in China.

During the days of the Family Computer, Nintendo developed the Disk System, a disk drive expansion for the Famicom with expanded RAM which allows players to use rewritable disk media called "disk cards". The system was relatively popular, but suffered from issues of limited capacity. However, Nintendo did see the market for an economical rewritable medium due to the popularity of the Disk System. The Nintendo Power cartridges address the issue of potential copyright infringement by the fact that they are highly proprietary and more difficult for illicit duplication, as opposed to being a somewhat more commoditized medium like the floppy disk. The limited capacity issue was addressed by maximizing the size of the flash memory in the cartridge to 4 megabytes (32 megabits), the largest amount used by the vast majority of Super Famicom games.

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