A seller I had delt with in the past contacted me a few weeks ago about having an X-Men VS Street Fighter SNES cartridge for sale. Strange thing about it was it was in a Japanese style SFC shell with a "legitimate" looking Japanese label, unlike the SNES style Brazilian release with the crappy label.
Soon after that another guy I deal with had the same thing, and a Tekken 2 cartridge done in the same way.
I ended up buying the X-Men vs Street Fighter game and got it in the mail today. It's an actual newly produced cartridge, and by new I mean went straight from the warehouse to my hands. The cartridge shell is SFC style so it won't fit in a US SNES with the tabs still intact. The PCB is new, so it's not a used board from the late 1990's; it's not a first run version. The board itself has some strange things, attached is a picture of it.
Just in case you cannot read it, the EEPROM chip has "X-MEN" written on it, the top says NINTENDO SUPER FAMICOM CARTRIDGE, the left says LoROM 16Mbit By WeLoveGame, the chip on the left has 1990 NINTENDO on it. This points to a lot of
really interesting things....
- WeLoveGame apparently produces their own PCB's, and probably shells being that it was a new one also
- They don't use globtops, which means either a low production run or a homemade outfit
- They're using EEPROMs, which
no pirate outfit is going to use this day and age
- Why on earth does the CIC chip on the left have Nintendo on it? NO UNLICENSED GAME USES THESE! This points to using sac carts for the CIC chip?
The point of all this is that until this was cracked few years ago the only versions that existed were the original production runs by DVS or
whoever, there wasn't a "pirated" version available. I've dumped it and yep, this version has the copy protection routine removed. So basically what you're buying isn't a legitimate cart, but something along the lines of a more professionally made repro cart.
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