this post was submitted on 22 May 2026
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Old-school proprietary memory cards like that generally are, because they don't mount a filesystem in the way a modern flash drive would.
You can safely remove the card without problem as long as there is no current write operation happening.
You often needed to switch memory card to change between games, depending which card your save was on, and people would certainly not turn the console off to do that, nor does the GameCube manual say you should.
You didn’t need to turn the console off to change games? In a disc based system? Wut?
Nope. It was pretty normal for multi disc games. Once you got so far, the game would give you a "insert disc X" screen," where you'd hot swap the discs and keep playing. I remember FF on PSX doing this.
Not to mention the games that were cool enough to let you swap in a music CD after the game loaded, so you could have your own soundtrack!
I still to this day get upset that I've never been able to fully play through Legend of Dragoon because BOTH COPIES I managed to find in my little hometown had Disc 3s that were too scratched to be read even after multiple attempts to repair them.
Yeah that was the real problem with hot swappable discs. The kids who actually physically performed that operation were often too impatient and careless to put the disc somewhere safe from scratching, because they wanted to immediately get back to playing.
the same thing happened to me with Suikoden 2. My dad bought a copy off eBay, not knowing it was a 2 disc game so I never got to finish it. Naturally I had to buy it when 1 & 2 were rereleased.
You could start a game, open the lid, swap discs, reset, and play the second game (can confirm on PS1, not sure on PS2 or GC). Unlike swapping cartridges in a SNES or MegaDrive and resetting without powering down, doing this wouldn't lead to a super weird game.
The PS1's Monster Rancher games would give you different monsters depending on what disc you put for the game to read when it asked.