Recent rise in Earthbound snes fakes.

I got caught by this last year - grabbed an Earthbound cart from a seller on eBay, got contacted by someone on eBay who found one of the carts he bought off the guy was a bootleg, then had to jump through so many hoops to get the money refunded. Thankfully the crowd here on Assembler helped, plus I also sent through copies of the PCB to Nintendo of America, and to their credit they provided an official response that the cart was fake.

Couldn't believe how much of a pain PayPal was when going through with this. Eventually I put together a 20-odd page report and they needed it faxed (!) at incredibly short notice otherwise they wouldn't refund the money.

These days if I'm buying cart-only I check for labels with a bit more wear so they look more authentic

 

You know what they say, if it's too good to be true it probably is

 

I'm amazed Nintendo actually bothered to help confirm authenticity.

Pikmin, it's not like people buying fake Earthbound carts are getting a steal of a deal. They're paying prices that people figure are current legitimate prices for authentic Earthbound cartridges. Then they may or may not find out later that they've received a counterfeit copy that's worse very little.

 

I am against people selling bootlegs as legit originals and I feel bad for those who get taken but I admit there is a part of me that thinks anything to hasten a crash of the retro market is a good thing.

 

Selling them as originals is just as bad as selling copied discs. You have a point there MottZilla, I have however seen a few people on other forums offering to make repros at a decent price provided you supply them with a donor cart

 

You don't need a donor cart anymore thankfully. You can get a brand new pcb and cartridge shell now.

 

Yes, but it costs at least 5x the price last I looked unfortunately.

 

Maybe it costs 5x if you can make the cartridge yourself out of a donor and flashrom. But if you're buying the "repro" from anyone, it costs the same or less as a new board.

Last I checked it was 20$ for a new one, and all those people slinging repros charge much more than that for a game.

 

20 programmed, with cart shell and all soldered up?

 

Yes. Though you may have to pay a couple bucks for the shells now, not sure. No soldering is required.

 

That's actually pretty good. When that was being prototyped the estimated cost was higher iirc

 

Where are these new PCBs and stuff?

 

http://www.infiniteneslives.com/

 

Yeah, this is a major problem and will lead to some major problems for the market. Truth is, repros are easy as heck and cheap. Why not cash in?

People rarely open up their carts and looks at the internals so they don't know what they are really buying.

There is nothing we can really do other than raise awareness (ie bitch and moan).

 

Moral, ethical, legal reasons? You are probably right that many people never open their cartridges. I've opened most of mine for cleaning purposes. And in the future probably to replace batteries.

 

Same every cartridge that I get that has batteries gets a socket installed and a new battery.

 

Good God, Earthbound carts are spreading on ebay like weeds.

How is an assortment like this even possible? There are currently ~130 Earthbound cart listings on ebay... with such a supply, fakes or not, how is the price managing to stay so inflated?

 

idiots still buying them at that price

 

Here's a pic of an english version of mother 3 with some sort of chip adapter (not familiar with programing chips). I really don't mind these except for the outrageous prices.

 

Idiots are definitely involved. Though I'm not sure these really high priced ones are selling. Did you search completed/sold listings? I see they sell around 130 and 150 bucks or so. While fakes are part of the supply, I really doubt that the game is in such demand anymore that supply is less than the demand. There are plenty of Earthbound cartridges out there and I can't imagine there is a market enough for them to really be that expensive. It's resellers and general beliefs that the game is somehow rare and valuable that result in the prices we see. I do think prices will eventually go down, atleast some. But you never know when that might be or how low it will reach in the future.

Either way I'm glad I don't have any interest in Earthbound but other games have been affected by similar stupidity.