Hello, I know this is my first post so I will do a quick introduction. I live in Las Vegas and I am a Camera dealer. I have a small interested in "retro" gaming so I like to buy odd things I find here and there (Like an Atari Video Music I picked up last year). The other day I was going through a stack of old Sega games and came across one that really stood out. The label only said "Tecmo Soft" and has a rabbit on it. The cartridge felt much heaver than normal ones I have bought in the past (when placed on a scale it weighs 3.6oz where a normal Genesis game weighs about 1.8oz). On the back it reads "Tecmo Super Bowl Prototype version 08-05-93, give an address and a name. I took the game over to a friends house to give it a try. When I started it up it was Tecmo NBA basketball. Thinking that was odd I decided to open the cart up. Inside I found the reason for the extra weight. There are four Eprom chips not just one. Each is labeled something different. So this got me thinking there might be a way to boot to the other chips. I think this forum would be a good place to turn to, to see if anyone knows what this is or any tips. Here are pictures of it compared to a normal game.
The board says 8 mega 4eprom. This suggests that each chip is 2 megs, which adds up to the correct size for the game you mentioned. The reason there are 4 chips, is because they are using 8bit eproms and the Genesis uses 16bit rom chips. Two 8bit chips form a 16bit memory easily. But since they use smaller chips that very small IC in the middle handles selection between the pairs to have the overall 8 megs of memory. So in short, there is nothing to be found. You have a sample or prototype board. You could have it dumped and compared, but all those chips are indeed in use.
It's also possible that tecmo reused that shell more than once and they didn't bother updating the label.
That is an authentic short board, AFAIK. I have one that holds Sonic 3 and there is a slight hardware mod to make it work with 4Mb EPROMs instead of 2Mb. I've also seen the same board used for several other protos (usually would be used for testers, public demo, or magazine review copies rather than the tall boards that SEGA also had).
