I've had this cartridge for a couple of years now. It's a black cart, with a colourful label, has the number 2023 and "ALL USA COLOR 64 in 1". Have a nice box to go with it too, somewhere. The games are the fake Mario Land 4, SML, Tetris, Dr. Mario, Alley Way, Battle City, Motocross, Lode Runner, Penguin Land, Bomb Jack, Pit Man and Flipull, so 11 (or 12) games that are then repeated. Anyway, up until recently, I only had a GB and GBP to use it in. On the GB, the menu comes up, and when a game is selected, the "Nintendo" comes down from the top (like it's loading the game), but the game doesn't come up. I didn't try them all, but of the many I tried, none worked. On the GBP, some of the games load and seem to be working ok, at least from the first 2 pages. The rest of them may load, but have serious graphics problems, or crash shortly after a game is started. Always thought the cartridge was a bit dodgy. So, I got my first (!) Gameboy Color last weekend, and tried this cartridge in it, and to my surprise, all the games work perfectly fine. I'm surprised, because I was under the impression that later versions of the GB would have had some type of protection to prevent these pirate cartridges from working on them, but I'm seeing the opposite. Can someone set me straight? Also, are there any good databases/sites with lists of these pirate cartridges?
I had a similar case recently. An old GB pirate cart which works on my original, monochrome GB but not on GBA or the Cube GB player. As for a database of pirates: http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=32499
Interesting, I also have a pirate cartridge that shows the same issues (some games don't work/partially work on my GBA SP/GBC). I'll try this cartridge with my first game boy to see if they work. But maybe in my case the cartridge is really damaged/badly flashed from the start.
I also have a pirate cart which works only on my old GB, but not on my GBA. However I don't think that Nintendo implemented any security checks, because a lot of other carts work fine on GBA. It could be also a power problem. Probably the pirate cart draws too much power?
A lot of Gameboy DMG multicarts actually relied on obscure tricks in the original Gameboy hardware to pull off the multiple ROMs trick. Also, after 2 years I finally make my 10th post! Win!
