Did i buy a counterfeit snes game? / How are they made?

[wgpearcelb]

hi everyone. i bought a game on the internet recently. chrono trigger. it was suspiciously cheap, and i think it may be counterfeit.  because it worked well, i didnt care, but the game-save battery gave out, and my game files got erased.  here are some pics, including the inside.  do u think i should try replacing the battery or just wait for a non-counterfeit copy to pop up? also, the insides seemed really non-standard and had some japanese writing on them.

http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f257/wgpearcelb/IMG_2258.jpg
http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f257/wgpearcelb/IMG_2261.jpg
http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f257/wgpearcelb/IMG_2260.jpg
http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f257/wgpearcelb/IMG_2259.jpg

you'll see the game battery is taped down w/ electrical tape too.. so, i'm pretty sure i got pwned.  theoretically, how rare is it to get a knock-off like this via ebay?

[wgpearcelb]

oh yeah, the front of the cart is in the old model too (w/out indentation) which i thought was weird cuz chrono trigger was like 1995, so it should have had the newer plastic cover.

[NFG]

Counterfeit, 100% guaranteed.

1. Nintendo rarely used surface-mount chips.  They were sometimes used for co-processors like the FX chip, etc, but never for ROMs.
2. Nintendo never used glop-top chips in SNES games
3. Nintendo's REAL PCBs were never that small, never that compressed, and never that cheaply made.

[wgpearcelb]

Thanks for answering that.  Damn ebay! 

[viletim]

do u think i should try replacing the battery or just wait for a non-counterfeit copy to pop up?

Now that you've opened it up, what's stopping you from just replacing the battery? It's not even soldered in.

[wgpearcelb]

Yeah, i think i will.

[Drakon]

what the hell.  Does it play like the original?

[wgpearcelb]

yeah. i mean, its the only copy ive ever played, but it seemed fine.  im just mad about the ebay description.

"great condition" "works just like new" when it's actually a knockoff w/ a bad save battery.

[NFG]

Technically that's not a lie...  It IS in great condition, the seller may not have known it's counterfeit, and really, the game's some ten years old now, at least.  Who's surprised the battery's dead?  (never mind that this cart is probably less than half that old!)

[Computolio]

    Why do the batteries die all the time on bootleg games anyway? Do they go out of their way to source bad batteries or something?

    Also, I was seriously wondering when bootlegs of the more expensive 16-bit games were going to show up. Chrono Trigger is only one of a large group of games that go for absolutely insane amounts of money; it's kind of odd that the bootleggers have only recently caught on.

[l_oliveira]

All the games made after 1993 *with* newer co-processors do contain SMD parts and most of them have SMD roms.
But as one can notice by the picture *all* Nintendo boards are identified accordingly. The board pictured is of the game Yoshi's Island. (SNS-YI)

An interesting case is the US Star Fox game which has the chips bonded directly to the printed circuit board, but with a high quality bonding
made at Sharp's factory, again while the board has epoxy "black blobs" it's a high quality build also has a Nintendo logo on it.

One thing I can say for sure ... You won't see flash memory on US SNES cartridges. The only Nintendo original cartridge that contain flash memories is a Super famicom cartridge which was sold for use with a special game rental/sales service similar to the Famicom disk system from 1985.

[Drakon]

Technically that's not a lie...  It IS in great condition, the seller may not have known it's counterfeit, and really, the game's some ten years old now, at least.  Who's surprised the battery's dead?  (never mind that this cart is probably less than half that old!)

my chrono trigger is a 1995 copy and the battery works great.  Hell my super mario world copy I got in 1991 and it still saves.  Only game I ever had saving trouble was a sonic 3 cart I picked up off of ebay.  It has flash memory and it came not saving.  And forget replacing the memory in that thing...I just bought another copy for 5$...was cheaper than bothering to try to fix it

[Computolio]

    I thought Sonic 3 used a battery for saving.

[l_oliveira]

An legitimate Sonic 3 cartridge will have a special parallel EEPROM chip as save ram.
The logic is the same as a standard SRAM battery backup for 16mbit cartridge so counterfeits will have battery and SRAM or nothing at all (can't save).

[wgpearcelb]

I also have 8 other games that also don't work believe it or not. These include  mario rpg, mario kart, mario all stars, ff2, ff:mq, zelda, kirby and breath of fire.  About half of them were bought either online or at a flea market, and i have around 20 other games that save and work fine and more that don't use the save feature. 

There's no chance that it is my snes system is screwing me over, is there?  Cuz also on occasion, if i click reset, or jostle the system the files will erase, although i'm usually pretty careful.  And sometimes I have like 4 files, and they erase one at a time.  any thoughts?

[l_oliveira]

Depending on the cartridge (older games are very likely to do it) dirty cartridge slot might cause the CPU to crash and 6502 family CPUs tend to go berserk when out of it's normal program path, executing "weird" code which might result on random writes on all memory. 
A very good example of this is the SNES Super Mario World and F-Zero cartridges.

Also, sometimes when people accidentally touch their SNES cartridges while playing it might hang and random sounds could be played or music changes or even weird graphic patterns appear on the screen.

Processors from 68000 family have a tight handshake control on bus/memory accesses so if a memory error happen (Ex: dirty cartridge slot on a Mega Drive console) it will cause an exception and the processor will hang/crash/stop instead of going executing miss-aligned code.

[viletim]

These batteries are all past their expiry date by now.

A battery in a pirate cart might go flat quickly because they used normal SRAM instead of the ultra low power stuff.

[Drakon]

I also have 8 other games that also don't work believe it or not. These include  mario rpg, mario kart, mario all stars, ff2, ff:mq, zelda, kirby and breath of fire.  About half of them were bought either online or at a flea market, and i have around 20 other games that save and work fine and more that don't use the save feature. 

There's no chance that it is my snes system is screwing me over, is there?  Cuz also on occasion, if i click reset, or jostle the system the files will erase, although i'm usually pretty careful.  And sometimes I have like 4 files, and they erase one at a time.  any thoughts?

my games lose data when the pins get dirty and don't connect cleanly when turning the system on.  So I clean the pins and all is good.  Did you make sure the connector pins on the console are clean and not loosened?

[sciafb]

hi, the first pic is a real starfox cart... but I just bought another to get a better condition cart to swap the pcb if one of them was an older revision etc..... and look what i found when i opened it up!

real
http://i392.photobucket.com/albums/pp5/sciafb/Picture26.jpg

highly doubt this is a real production..
http://i392.photobucket.com/albums/pp5/sciafb/Picture27.jpg

It does play like the real thing, I tried it after i saw this lol
I have a hard time believing this is a real cart. Is it? looking at it now, I do see a light/faint printing (unlike usual gold or clearly white printing on pcb) of (c) 1990 Nintendo,  (M) 1992 A/N Inc , MARIO CHIP 1 , SNS-F0-2, and theres another (C) this time 1993 Nintendo... whats going on?

[dj898]

2nd pic is the bootleg. no doubt bout it~

[l_oliveira]

Man ... Read my post about direct chip bonding. That's the first generation Star Fox cartridge made at Sharp. 
There is *NO* pirate copies of Starfox because the pirates back then had no way to dupe/copy the FX chip.

[wgpearcelb]

I also have 8 other games that also don't work believe it or not. These include  mario rpg, mario kart, mario all stars, ff2, ff:mq, zelda, kirby and breath of fire.  About half of them were bought either online or at a flea market, and i have around 20 other games that save and work fine and more that don't use the save feature. 

There's no chance that it is my snes system is screwing me over, is there?  Cuz also on occasion, if i click reset, or jostle the system the files will erase, although i'm usually pretty careful.  And sometimes I have like 4 files, and they erase one at a time.  any thoughts?

my games lose data when the pins get dirty and don't connect cleanly when turning the system on.  So I clean the pins and all is good.  Did you make sure the connector pins on the console are clean and not loosened?

My connector pins are clean. How do i make sure they're not loosened?

[sciafb]

Man ... Read my post about direct chip bonding. That's the first generation Star Fox cartridge made at Sharp. 
There is *NO* pirate copies of Starfox because the pirates back then had no way to dupe/copy the FX chip.

thats interesting, do you have anymore information about sharp making this and other games for nintendo? I would like to read more.

[l_oliveira]

Sharp has been making chips for Nintendo since the 80s... Just like Ricoh and Sony made them the CPU and sound chips for the SNES, Nintendo used Rohm and Sharp parts for the A/V circuitry (the BA series of chips are made by Rohm and the Sharp ships bear an uppercase "S" in them.)

Sharp (And Casio too) are notorious for their portable device manufacturing and assemblies. If you dismantle an early 80s Sharp calculator, an Gameboy or any other stuff with Sharp parts you're going to see their characteristic chip bonding.  They also are the best LCD screen manufacturer, so all japanese hand held video games that use LCD screens have them from Sharp. (All models of the PSP, all Nintendo portable games including Game & Watch)

It's just like SEGA had Hitachi and Yamaha, Konami used Toshiba and Fujitsu to build their own custom chips on both home console cartridges and arcade boards

Capcom had Fujitsu and Toshiba making their arcade board chips too ...

[phreak97]

dunno if it's relevant, nintendo have used direct bonded ic's before these too.. i have a nes cart with them that i am very confident is legit. it's a mario/duck hunt/world track meet, i think.. might just be a mario/duck hunt, im not opening both of them now. the board is still high quality though..


i've had a few snes carts with flat batteries, when i was a kid i bought sim city brand new, and after two or three years the battery wet flat (it stopped saving, i didnt know they had batteries till i was alot older) so we traded it in. i guess batteries just dont have a 100% success rate in regard to reaching their target lifespan.
more recently i've bought some snes games which had flat batteries, mario rpg was one. i had a zelda cart i was playing, left it a few weeks, then got greeted with a set of blank save files when i came back to it; the battery was flat.

pokemon gold/silver gameboy cartridges fail 10 times as often as other gameboy games. i used to replace batteries for game traders for $5 per cart. i'd be given around three pokemon gold/silver carts at a time, and one random other game would turn up every couple of months. the other pokemon games didnt seem to have such a problem, they turned up more often than other games, but i still probably only did three or four the whole time i was doing it (a year or so).

the main cause of flat batteries in games other than pokemon gold/silver were games going through the washing machine, or having drinks spilled into them. but a snes cart label would show if such a thing had happened, and theyre less likely to be carried around unnoticed in your pockets too.

i havnt looked at the cart yet, but is it possible that leaving a cart in a console with the power off (or on even?) uses more battery power than having the cart removed? or does the save ram isolate it's power completely?

im going to bed.
'night

[l_oliveira]

Well ... The Pokemon carts have SRAM *and*  Real Time Clock (RTC)...

[phreak97]

yeah, i guess that's the reason.. are there no other rtc games?

[l_oliveira]

Well... Pokemon needed it because it had time based events. I dunno about other games.

I have FF I and II US and it has a Fujitsu FE-RAM chip (MB85R256A)

For backup purposes FE-RAM chips are just perfect... No battery at all

[phreak97]

i dont understand why pokemon needed the rtc feature to actually be a running function while the cart is off.. who would know any different if the game were to just figure out what would have happened since last save when you power it on?

[l_oliveira]

The game would say "come back in few hours" then if you didn't turn it on and play you would lose that "event".
And I think all of the newer pokemon games still have the said RTC.
If the battery is flat, the game shows a message saying you can play but warns about not being able to save the progress and how time based events will no longer happen.

[phreak97]

yeah, i know what it does, but couldnt it use a regular clock to calculate what was or is due to happen next time you power on? pokemon blue/red knew what time it was, and they dont run out of battery.

[l_oliveira]

Well ... There is no Gameboy with real time clock chip so time based events would require the game console to be kept on to happen. So games without them have to count time only while the game is running. Having an RTC onboard makes it possible to create events that the player can lo0se or avoid by just not be playing while the time for the event passes.

The Nintendo DS has RTC but it's no Gameboy. It just happens to play GBA games ... lol

[Chuplayer]

hi, the first pic is a real starfox cart... but I just bought another to get a better condition cart to swap the pcb if one of them was an older revision etc..... and look what i found when i opened it up!

real
http://i392.photobucket.com/albums/pp5/sciafb/Picture26.jpg

highly doubt this is a real production..
http://i392.photobucket.com/albums/pp5/sciafb/Picture27.jpg

It does play like the real thing, I tried it after i saw this lol
I have a hard time believing this is a real cart. Is it? looking at it now, I do see a light/faint printing (unlike usual gold or clearly white printing on pcb) of (c) 1990 Nintendo,  (M) 1992 A/N Inc , MARIO CHIP 1 , SNS-F0-2, and theres another (C) this time 1993 Nintendo... whats going on?

The blob Star Fox cart is most likely legit. My copy from the mid to late 90s I bought new and sealed from Toys R Us is a blob cart. Shocked me, too.

[phreak97]

are there any snes carts that look fake but arent? like the sega ozisoft carts look fake, but were actually licensed, HES made some pretty substandard licensed carts for various consoles (aswel as unlicensed ones). i havnt seen any for the snes though.

[Scared0o0Rabbit]

Anyone have any tips for avoiding pirate carts on ebay?  I've ended up with them once or twice before, and it always makes me angry.  My most recent one was aria of sorrow for the GBA and it wouldn't save.  Opened it up, and there was no battery.  Then I looked at the front of the cart and realized they had the wrong rating for the game on it lol.

[Drakon]

Anyone have any tips for avoiding pirate carts on ebay?  I've ended up with them once or twice before, and it always makes me angry.  My most recent one was aria of sorrow for the GBA and it wouldn't save.  Opened it up, and there was no battery.  Then I looked at the front of the cart and realized they had the wrong rating for the game on it lol.

uhh, check the rating on the seller.  Look for good pictures.  I've found some MVS auctions on ebay where the cart was actually opened up and they had pictures showing that the boards on the inside were legit.  I was really cautious about that when buying my sf2 arcade board considering how many pirate boards of sf2 that're out there.  I found a guy with a great history and he had a picture of the board clearly being a cps1 legit board.  And he also had a picture of it running with the board in the picture.

[shaurz]

Hello there. Here are some pictures of my Chrono Trigger cartridge for comparison. Bought recently on ebay. I think it's real but who knows these days? Haven't tried it yet since I am still looking for an NTSC SNES.

That place is crawling with fake GBA carts. It looks like some people are re-selling fakes which they bought on ebay from Hong Kong, probably unaware. And I wish people would learn to use the macro mode on their camera.

[NFG]

That one looks real to me, based on the Nintendo logo on the PCB and security chip, and the name-brand CR2032 battery.

[Kirurishii]

hi, the first pic is a real starfox cart... but I just bought another to get a better condition cart to swap the pcb if one of them was an older revision etc..... and look what i found when i opened it up!

real
http://i392.photobucket.com/albums/pp5/sciafb/Picture26.jpg

highly doubt this is a real production..
http://i392.photobucket.com/albums/pp5/sciafb/Picture27.jpg

It does play like the real thing, I tried it after i saw this lol
I have a hard time believing this is a real cart. Is it? looking at it now, I do see a light/faint printing (unlike usual gold or clearly white printing on pcb) of (c) 1990 Nintendo,  (M) 1992 A/N Inc , MARIO CHIP 1 , SNS-F0-2, and theres another (C) this time 1993 Nintendo... whats going on?

The blob Star Fox cart is most likely legit. My copy from the mid to late 90s I bought new and sealed from Toys R Us is a blob cart. Shocked me, too.

They're both legit. The early copies of Starfox and also Starwing (PAL version) were pretty standard the picture27 kind. Later productions were made using the much cheaper conventional method.


About the Chrono Trigger knock-off, I'd really would like a close look on that one. I'm a guy who tried making custom carts using original Jap carts, building the translated rom in, like Seiken Densetsu and all. It's a b#tch making them, especially when there has to fit 4 of those huge IC inside the cart. If it's really that easy to build a cheap cart-pcb like this on (like you can find in older or small games like Total Carnage, nothing more than the MaskROM contacing the game and the region(CIC)chip) an EEPROM or FLASH for the savegames (with battery), and another Flashmemory for the gameROM, the regionchip on the otherside of the board to get the game working on the preffered SNES and done. Perhaps it's this cart was build after an example, one can find on the internet, of a DIY flashcart.

@shaurz:  I wish I'd buy a pirate cart one day without knowing so. I always open up my cats when they arrived.. A proven pirated cart are quite rare nowadays. A guy I know has a bunch of SNES carts from Korea with 20 NES games on them, real NES games, not the rip off kind. And it works flawless, ever seen one of those? I have one where I replaced the CIC so that It can be used in a PAL SNES, works like a charm, on both 50 and 60 Hz.

[GirlGeek]

Fake SNES games on sale on Aliexpress http://www.aliexpress.com/store/group/Games-for-SFC/633347_259758390.html