Haven’t owned a cartridge system since I lived under parents and yeah, it was the same for me, turn it off when you’re done using it because it’ll drive the power bill up and money doesn’t grow on trees and all that. I can’t imagine systems like the SNES or N64 really drew that much power though? But as a tree hugger and an engineer, I tend to avoid any level of waste. I doubt cartridges suffer from any significant wear from being left on, since they’re just solid state electronics.

Anything with a fan gets immediately turned off when my session ends because I’m hyper sensitive to fan noise (not sure if this is an autism thing?)