Original SL release of Devil Land by Vast Fame. Use UCM for Vast Fame's SL releases in hhugboy

Dark alleyway sales would be a pretty bad business model for this sort of stuff. Most of this stuff could just be sold out in the open since it was in countries where IP law was either weakly enforced or not enforced

Small shops I would guess was the most common distribution method, followed by mail order.

Where and when you were buying this stuff matters though. Waixing had (or I guess has) a very long career and was in Mainland China. I've heard Chinese users mention their games being available even in larger stores (supermarkets) at one point, but Waixing continued operations in the Famicom business much later than Hummer (which stuck around for a while but had moved on from cartridges). Out in Taiwan though it was only really small stores since this stuff died out earlier there and larger stores weren't much of a thing back then there

Without statements from people who were there though it is hard to say for certain for each game. Sometimes they showed up in magazine ads if you were lucky

Ruten, Shopee Taiwan, and Yahoo Auctions Taiwan are all good sites to try. You'll need an agent to buy from them if you aren't in Taiwan though. I'd recommend Miakyou as an agent
https://miakyou.blogspot.com/

I know this is super late but do you still have the dump file for this Chikorita bootleg game?
If so, may you please email this to me? I would be so happy to play this!

It isn't supported in emulators. I tried dumping it a long time ago, but I am not even sure anymore if I dumped it correctly the first time back when I posted it. If you are serious about wanting to play it then I do remember an old listing for a copy that might still be up if you want to play it on real hardware, but I'm not sure if that one is still up

As far as I'm aware those are the only two Shanghai Paradise carts that have been documented. There's another GD cart that might be from the same publisher, but it does not have Shanghai Paradise stuff on it

https://bootleggames.fandom.com/wiki/BomberBoy

There should be some pictures of Super Hang On in the discord (here's one I nabbed). Not sure where to get better pics of Blood of Jurassic though. The shell itself can vary but the sticker should have their logo on it as well as a GD ID code. These are really hard to find though. If you search Chinese and Taiwanese sites regularly maybe you'll find one. Flea markets I don't think are going to have these though

Oh you actually bought that one? Neat. Frankly my initial excitement of getting a Fire Bird has dwindled since we last talked about it but if I find an opportunity to get one then I certainly would consider it, lol.

If you've gotten the opportunity to dump the ROM from the working unit, can you confirm if it's identical to the common ROM? I'd also be interested in seeing what that weird link cable option at the bottom of the main menu does on real hardware, as going by emulation of the ROM, it still has the menu cursor for some reason and pressing the A button shows a loading dialog with changing hex values, which probably isn't how it's supposed to work? I'm willing to be proven wrong though. :p

The link cable thing didn't work when I tried it on cart. Probably doesn't activate unless you plug something into the link cable port. Maybe it's for copying codes between devices

Edit: Translation software says its for updating the device