I recently found this cart in storage and noticed that there were no Nintendo markings at all on it. This was purchased a couple of months before the US launch date and I assume it must be a pirate copy (not knowing at the time). The layout looks vastly different to the jap version at the nescartdb http://bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/profile.php?id=1487 Any info would be great.
I think I have something like this. But in my case, the pirate cart was so poor the case broke. Just your run of the mill pirate.
This is an interesting cart. Clearly a bootleg, and the date codes suggest manufacture post Dec. '89, the game was released Feb. 12, '90 in the US so that's on the money. There is 2M of PRG ROM, 1M of CHR ROM, 8KB of WRAM, all like the real SMB3, but not only is the hardware vastly different to the real MMC3, the logic is. There is one chip of distinction, the KS 202 supposedly manufactured by National Semi, maybe they made mask arrays, I dunno, probably the logo is faked. It has to be some kind of ASIC holding the brunt of the logic, though in such a tiny package it's hard to understand how it can implement so many MMC3 functions that are missing in the discrete logic. Going over the logic it's just not possible so the game must be extensively hacked to run on minimal hardware. Does it play identically to the real thing? Something also strange is the extra 6116 (2K x 8) SRAM. Perhaps it's used as a ghetto register file for CHR ROM since the KS 202 doesn't have enough I/O. This would actually be pretty funny and clever albeit expensive and slightly wasteful. My guess is that the PAL performs the address decoding and some random logic (the PRG needs 1 more register file bit = 3 outputs, and must decode the '670 file. That takes up 5 outputs though leaving 3 for the two PRG ROM enables and VRAM A10 mirroring. There isn't enough logic to correctly implement the complex MMC3 PRG switching, but maybe SMB3 doesn't need it. The KS 202 must be responsible for the IRQ counter, perhaps mirroring instead of the PAL, and whatever random logic for the SRAM register file. The '08 AND gate is almost certainly to map WRAM.
I do remember playing through the whole game from start to finish without anything missing. The cart does seem to be a complex solution but it must have been cheaper to produce at that time than the original. I'm just surprised at how much they were able to cram in there compared to most other legit carts of that time.
Who knows what they charged for it. They wouldn't have made it if they couldn't make money off them. There are plenty of other famicom bootlegs with a bunch of discrete logic plus a PAL chip.
Well it is crazy is that they made an ASIC for this game which is a very costly process, but instead of choosing a larger 44+ pin gate array which probably costs only slightly more per unit and could directly implement a true MMC3 directly they decided to build it with a small array and a bunch of discrete parts, including a PAL, '670 file and SRAM, probably around $8 of parts at the time. They also had to spend a lot of time hacking the game to run on this wacko hardware. I think it's their form of copy protection since their work definitely cannot be ripped off due to the ASIC, nor can the hacked ROM be used as a data source, another bootlegger would have to go to the real thing.
I'm guessing the "KS" might be a reference to Kaiser, they made quite a lot of FDS to cart ports which usually have a KS-xxx ID number. but the logo on the cart is Chi Chi Toy Company, I dunno much about them.
I have recently bought a very similar cartridge, but it's Rockman 2: http://img831.imageshack.us/img831/9559/img3008custom.jpg http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/7573/img28430custom.jpg
Except yours doesn't have funky hardware, it's a standard MMC1 clone (but with 0.1" lead spacing), and a '139 to decode the old small ROMs they were trying to use up.
