Alternate model RGB capable PAL Snes?

[Rockman Pocket]

Hi there, figured this would be the best place to inquire about this.

Today my younger brother received his own PAL Snes from somebody on the internet. It was a bare Snes, so it came without cables, box or anything else. So to test it I let him use my cables, including my (unmodded) PAL Gamecube RGB cable. Now we all know what happens when you plug that cable into a PAL Snes - the system boots up in RGB, but after a second the screen fades to near black.

Well, not this Snes.

We tested a dozen of games and every one of them booted up in lush colors with a sharp image quality without fading to black. Naturally I also hooked up my own PAL Snes to see if it somehow was the RGB cable's doing, but no, the screen still faded to black as usual.

I don't have one of those funky screwdrivers needed to open the system, so I can't take pics of the motherboard for y'all to compare it with other Snes motherboards. I have the model- and serialnumbers though, they are respectively SNSP-001A(FRG) and UP18044647. The region/voltage info sticker on the back also is different from the one on my Snes, as it's positioned above the serial number, opposed to below as on my Snes. It's also larger than the one on my Snes.

So then, what could be going with this Snes? Could it be modded without the seller knowing? Or could it simply be a different model than most people over here have? Regardless, I thought he (my brother) was getting ripped off at �15 for a bare Snes, but seeing as it outputs RGB without needing a modded GC RGB cable it doesn't seem like too bad a deal in retrospect.

[viletim!]

That sounds like normal operation of an NTSC SNES. Strange, but as it's from Nintendo it doesn't surprise me much.