I am working on a game console with an arduino mega and a toucscreen where I make retro games. I am planning on making 10 games in total and I would like to have highscores saved in the EEPROM. However, after never using the EEPROM before, I am not sure how to proceed and asking for tips. I read abit about it, and I noticed it mentoined that it has 100 000 write/clear cycles, and I would really prefer not breaking my arduino mega. But my plan is that one game will get about 50 updates in its highscore, maybe 100. And one highscore will be defined with one letter, ex. Y and then the number of the score. And since I will be having around 10 games, that would mean it would be max 1000 cycles of write/clear in total if I'm not mistaken?
I would really appriciate any help with how to so this, as I have no experience with EEPROM.
It's 100,000 writes for each location in the EEPROM, not 100,000 writes to the EEPROM as a whole. Since you're writing the different scores to different locations, each score has the full 100,000 writes available.
Furthermore, 100,000 is the minimum that the manufacturer guarantees you will get over all the operating conditions. In practice under normal conditions (not super cold or super hot) you'll probably get much more than that. Not that you'll need it.
Think of an empty book of 10,000 blank pages
You can only write and erase on each page, 100,000 times.
That means you can write on any page you want so the fear is not as bad as you might think.
As for high score... if you have one game and the high score is beaten 100,000 times... someone is playing that game really fast, breaking the high score once per minute would take almost 3 months at 24/7