Man... oldschool gaming is hardcore. I have been playing SNES games and they use a password system where you only get the password if you get enough points, which are one-shot only and if you miss your chance, no password for you. lol. And then you have to play another 4 levels to get your next password... upon which the difficulty to get it is progressively more difficult.

As you may know, SNES cartridges used a button cell for saving state between sessions. Now I also understand why I had spent entire afternoons on a game in my childhood... because you couldn't save. LOL. It was just passwords.