I wanted to share this find with you guys. I've come across all kinds of weird famicom pirate/multi carts. But I haven't seen one like this before. Its a bit smaller than a NES cart, and has the standard 60 pin famicom card edge. It also has some weird vents on front, At first I thought they were for dip switches. Other than the crappy SMB3 sticker on the front, this thing is freakin QUALITY. It is well put together, unlike almost all other pirate carts I've seen. And it weighs a TON. I regret admitting that I payed $27 for it (The guy was nice enough to give me 10% off). But it was like a mystery to me. I had to get it home and open it up. What was in this cart? There is no sloppy soldering here, no eproms either. I honestly have no idea what I'm looking at though. Just a freaking TON of chips. I thought for sure this was going to be something special. Like The multicart of all multicarts! I mean, why on earth would there be all this on one pirate cart, only to have one game.... SO! I had to take apart an NES because the size of this cart plus the adapter wouldn't fit. But I finally got it fired up... It's SMB3... That's it. I tried holding buttons, playing with power and reset.... Nothing.... So I played some SMB3.. More pics. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1371049/nwc/20141203_194316.jpg https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1371049/nwc/20141203_194329.jpg https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1371049/nwc/20141203_194650.jpg https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1371049/nwc/20141203_194713.jpg
Interesting. They kept Japanese text as the back but the top is Chinese. After playing, did the cart was kinda hot or anything?
Looks perfectly plausible to me - it looks like it has 3 x 1 megabit masked ROM chips - the one on the right is the CHR rom and the 2 on the left are the PRG roms. The 28 pin Goldstar chip above it is a RAM (work RAM) - and the rest of the SSI and MSI chips are a discrete logic implementation of Nintendo's MMC3 chip. It is a very nicely built (and presumably quite expensive to build) pirate cart, though. I suspect (based on the fact that so many of the logic chips are Goldstar) that it might have been made in Korea, despite the languages on the label.
Could it be to add the special effects from the Japanese version of the game or something so it can emulate the sound chips of the actual Famicom hardware to a clone machine or Nes?
I'm pretty sure it's just a MMC3 clone - it seems to have the right parts for it. There are a couple of 'LS374s (8 bit latches - presumably one holds the page number and the other the compare value for the IRQ counter) - 2 4 bit counters (the IRQ counter), some 'LS74 flipflops (things like the mirroring control bits), some multiplexers (to swap over the address lines) and a whole bunch of glue logic. I can't be sure, since not all the numbers are clear, but what I can see is consistent with that, and the general level of complexity is about right.
http://www.nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=8&threadid=64994 I found this thread from NA. Doesn't shed much more light on it. Interesting though.
That's awesome. I would imagine other MMC3 games were made in the same pirate pcb and plastic cart. Would make sense to do more than just SMB3.
