Action Replay Cartridge Use
| Field | Computing |
| Went Obsolete | 1990s |
| Made Obsolete By | Bittorrent, flash disks & game complication |
| Knowledge Assumed | Working knowledge of target computer / console |
| When useful | Game copying, game saving, sprite inserion |
The action replay was stuck in the back of my Amiga. It allowed you to freeze any game, dump the memory to the cartridge, from here you could fiddle about quite a bit. One of its main uses was then to dump the game onto a blank disk for, er, educational purposes. You could also save your game this way which was awesome for games with no save feature. More interestingly however you could save all the sprites out & load in sprites from other games - EG playing turrican with the sprites from rainbow islands.
I remember this cartridge didn't usually work that well & crashed most games magnificently.
[Actually the Action Replay is still on sale as a Nintendo DS and GameBoy? accessory, and still has its uses on those platforms. My son has been bugging me to buy him one so he can access hidden glitches in his Pokemon games. So I dispute the obsolescence of this skill. --Jens Alfke]
[It is a different beast, even though the name is the same. The old C-64/Amiga Action replays are debugging tools that allow you to stop/restart program execution and get a disassembly and register dump along with lots of other tools. You can modify the software on the go if you are skilled in machine language. Basically you can do anything you want to the computer with it. The console action replays only allow you to enter in codes that were pre-published in magazines, quite limited in comparison. -Ville Jouppi]