Yar har har

[FyberOptic]

I finally got me a tri-wing screwdriver dirt cheap, so I thought I'd start opening everything ever that uses those silly screws.  Namely, my Gamecube controller to try and fix the C stick, and some GBA cartridges.

Once upon a time, Prof Hazard gave me his Advance Wars 2 cart, because he suspected it of being a pirate, and he wanted a real version.  It's not very hard to determine the legitimacy of it, considering the back says Nintondo.



But upon opening it, it's clearly cheaply made, using big'ol epoxy splotches to cover the roms instead of using actual chips.  It also uses an actual battery with some sram, instead of a nice piece of flash memory.  I opened up my genuine Zero Mission cart so you can get a good idea of the difference in quality:



This company has probably taken Nintendo for hundreds of thousands of dollars selling these bootlegs, possibly millions depending on how many different carts they produce, so it's really no wonder companies like Nintendo go to so much trouble to add region checks and all that sort of stuff, in at least some small attempt at preventing everybody and their brother from producing pirated versions.

[Boris]

Nintondo seal of approaval.

[MDude]

I didn't realy think there were many people who would go to the trouble to even make a fake cartridge case. I mean, the existance pirate DVDs makes sense because you can buy blank DVDs in bulk from a Wall-Mart or somewhere, but it's not like you can get a bunch of proprierity game packs without anyone asking questions. I thought if someone was willing to take the time to make their own cartriges, they would bother to make their own homebre games as well, even if they're horrible rip-offs. Like this:

* MDude makes about a hundred copies of a game called "Improved Turf Wars" and sells them on the street, the only difference with Advanced Wars being that the various units are replaced by stereotypes of street gang culture.

[FyberOptic]

Many times the logos and seals of approval and such on these pirate carts will appear blurred, or just lack that crisp-edged appearance that a legit cart has, yet still keep the actual Nintendo logo.  They probably lacked the proper equipment to make such a quality case.  This one went as far as to either intentionally change the name to avoid possibly getting into worse trouble, or they were just such total retards that they didn't know how to spell it.

NES carts were harder to pirate because of the extra hardware involved in doing the memory mappers.  That didn't stop'em, though!  Some of those carts ended up having hacked versions of the roms to run on proprietary junk, and some of which ended up being really unreliable and buggy.

What I forgot to mention is that this Advance Wars 2 cart even has the stupid mode 7 logo thing that the rom I got off the internet once has.  One of them stupid things a pirate group adds into it, you know.  They didn't even bother to strip it out to make it look more legit.


But just to show you that even legit Nintendo products can still use epoxy blobs, here's what the newer revision of SMB/Duck Hunt/Track Meet looks like:



It actually looks even larger here than it really is. They're very short compared to a normal cart board. And it's the scourge to a modder who wants to socket a board for other uses, but it meant lower manufacturing costs for Nintendo, for carts they needed to mass-produce in huge quantities. We all know you can find the various SMB carts a dime a dozen. This is partially why! Though a non-revision A cart of this game should still be usable for modding. It's hard to tell how many other later carts got manufactured this way. But you can generally tell by the weight as to whether it's actually got some chips in it, or an epoxy glob.

[ecto]

Speaking of pirated carts this is just blatant.



http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Nintendo-NES-Famicom-game-Ghostbusters-3_W0QQitemZ330022818014QQihZ014QQcategoryZ54958QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem