SNES Super Mario World PAL pre-release cart

Seeing that board reminds me of something - a few years ago, one of my friends got hold of a little stack of those EPROM based boards, maybe 5 or 6. They were very strange - the board was completely assembled except for the battery, which was not installed (and apparently never had been, based on the lack of solder), although there was an SRAM on the board - and the EPROM soldered to the card was just filled with FFs, and had apparently never been programmed (not faulty, we desoldered one of them and it programmed and erased correctly). My initial idea was that maybe the chip was programmed on the board, but looking at the layout it was obvious that Vpp was just connected directly to Vcc and there was no way it could be programmed in circuit.

We never could come up with any rational explanation for why they had built these things, since they appeared to be completely useless...

 

nice

 

Some with special chips, as the roms are not directly accessible from the cart edge pins.

 

That reminds me; I'm FINALLY grabbing a retrode + some other equipment after the summer (moving next month), so I'll get around to dump some of those SNES/SFC boards I've had in my corner sine "forever" (since my old Hyper Effect Pro. 9 backup unit wont boot with the inserted)

 

Nice find! Great to see it has a proto board inside!

 

With the SNES, such cases are incredibly rare. And it is pretty trivial to remove the EPROMs off specialized SNES prototype boards (which generally are socketed) and put them on a standard one for dumping.

 

I was really upset when that happened. Luckily we were still able to learn a lot about the prototype, and the corrupted and fixed ROMs were released to the public.