Little Ninja Hattori-kun Prototype Famicom Cartridge

So I've recently acquired this prototype cart for a Famicom game called Little Ninja Hattori-kun. To my knowledge, there wasn't any standardization for test cartridges for the Famicom, so companies would typically fabricate whatever hardware they needed at the time. My question here is twofold: does anyone have any idea what the switch on the board actually does? Information on games with these switches seems very scarce, but I did come across a thread here that said that they might be used to delete data of the cartridge, but if that's the case, then why leave the eproms exposed? Also to my knowledge the game is identical to the full release, however on the off-chance it isn't, I'd still like to dump it, so if anyone could perhaps point me in the right direction for that, I would super appreciate it.

 

It's not a prototype cartridge, it's a cartridge that you use with a Famicom cartridge copier. The switch is to switch between the two eproms once they've had games copied to them.

 

There were Famicom cartridge copiers? I've only heard of disk copiers for the Famicom. Who made devices for copying the actual cartridges, and what are they actually called?

 

I see one at least once a month on Yahoo Auctions, often with cartridges like yours but with Mitsubishi stickers over the eprom, but this is the only thing I could find through Google.

http://www.start-game.com/2014/02/family-friend/family-friend-famicom-cart-copier-3/

 

Well what actually flashes the eproms?

 

The cart copying device that I can't find photos of. There's loads of them though, just like the SNES/SFC ones.

 

Family Ace copier, Frankie on gamedoctor HK has one for sale for 199
http://gamedoctorhk.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=126&products_id=2116
like Kev said, get your money back. theres pictures of the manual showing the copy cart, that matches yours to the TEE

 

These supposed Hattori-kun prototypes seem to show up fairly often. I guess it was a frequently copied game back in the day. To date I only know of one (presumably) official prototype of the game which has all power ups immediately selectable and a couple graphical differences from the final game, one of which appears to match the screenshots in the manual.