Might be a good heads up for some members, but after watching a recent CUPodcast I learned that there are so many fake SNES games appearing now: https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesal...160921000527&SearchText=action+game+cartridge
Welcome to China, my friend. The MD (Genesis) carts often even come with cases, which the SNES/SFC ones do not have - yet.
On eBay I have definitely seen fake SNES game boxes for the expensive games like earthbound and such. The ones on aliexpress don't look/feel legit at all really because they use cheap plastic, some people do buy the fakes on aliexpress though and swap with like a real sports game cart and print off a high quality sticker then it's much harder to tell them apart unless you look at the circuit board.
Sure, some people even print them on demand. Thing is, you have to put in a minimum of work (or at least buy your items from a couple of different places and put everything together); you cannot (yet) buy a stack of, say, 10 CIB Earthbounds to flip on eBay (or even right out dropship them if you're a really lazy f-ck...), as you can with MD games. And I have yet to see any SNES repro manuals, too. (Anyone know if the MD chinacarts have them?)
The thing is that the Chinese can make copies so good that you have to X-ray the chips to tell they aren't original. Luckily nobody seems to have gone to those lengths with SNES cartridges yet. Or maybe they have, and it's just that nobody has noticed?
LOL everything on Aliexpress.com is fake. Assume that on every transaction and you'll be fine. Even the stuff that looks completely legit is probably made in some kid's garage. The failure rate on electronics is unbelievable.
No custom chips? Don't quote me on this but I think I saw some Megaman X2/3 carts at some point. Iirc the CX4 is really just some rebranded generic DSP and had its firmware extracted, so cloning it shouldn't have been too hard, at least compared to ASICs like the SuperFX.
I seem to remember that some of the games with custom chips (Street Fighter Alpha 2?) just used them to decompress graphics. Part of me thinks that you can get a ROM hack of the data already decompressed, for emulators that don't support custom chips. (All of the above may be total baloney, but it's what I seem to remember) Also, there's a Megaman X in the listings, but no X2/X3.
Such a hacked ROM exists for Star Ocean. It's meant for copiers with enough memory, but I don't see why it shouldn't work for repro carts. Haven't seen one for SF2A/Z (the only other SDD1 game) but haven't really looked for it either. (And no, those "graphic packs" don't count, they're an emulation-only thing.)
You could make a bootleg Mega Man X2 or X3 cartridge. It's just not as simple or standard as all these other games. Usually the pirates aren't that smart or don't want to bother with something so specific. The Cx4 was used in only those 2 games. And while I haven't checked in awhile, they aren't super expensive or hard to find like some other ROM only games that are dead easy to pirate. Now if there was some open source ready to go design for making Cx4 boards you'd see the bootlegs. Same for Super FX or anything else. But since no one already did the hard work, you don't see the pirates. Star Ocean, one of the two SDD-1 games has that 96 megabit decompressed hack by neviksti intended to play on the Game Doctor SF6 and SF7. Street Fighter Alpha 2 could have the same thing done but no one has done so yet. The Star Ocean hack can fairly easily be put on a cartridge so there probably are bootlegs using that exact ROM.
Yeah TBH it just looks like they went on ebay, typed in 'SNES game', sorted the list 'Price High to Low' and started working their way down the list, doing games that just require a ROM.
I agree. It's extremely likely they used ebay to decide what games to sell bootlegs of. Whenever they come across a game that uses a DSP or additional chip they just skip over it. And it's not just asian pirates. There are people all over that make bootlegs of games that list for high prices on ebay.
Wait until China gets onto the bootleg StarFox 2 Action, you won't be able to find a stunt race fx cart anywhere.
It could happen, I've bought what I thought was a genuine Super Mario Advance 2 cart, when it was delivered I noticed that the label had been badly stretched. I played the game and it had graphical corruption, so I popped open the cart. Lo and behold, the board was from some crappy Star Wars GBA game that had it's mask ROM desoldered and a flash ROM in it's place. So if the payoff is good enough and the labour is cheap enough, they'll do it.
