This Terranigma pirate cart looks like it cost more to make than the real thing

So I'm browsing the local shops and rummaging through some dirty cartridges when I see a Japanese copy of Terranigma. I knew pretty much instantly that it was pirate cart because the label was misaligned, but something was odd; it was heavy. It felt as heavy or heavier than 2 SNES games.

After paying 3,000 won (~$2.75)for it, I got it home and opened it up. I saw two chips on the front and some wire. When I flipped the PCB I was shocked to seea LOT of large chips, and a battery. Long story short, this pirate cartridge most likely cost more to make than a real Terranigma cart. The cartridge works, but the battery is corroded a bit so it doesnt save anymore. If I replace the battery I should be good to go.

 

Looks like an impressive effort just to make a pirate cart. I wonder if you fix the label, you could get away with selling it as legitimate

 

Only reason there is so many chips is because they are quiet small. Likely what ever was cheapest (and cheaper than buying larger chips).

 

Like NeoGeo Multi Carts, they likely used salvaged/cheap memory which makes it profitable to produce. The NeoGeo Multi Carts certainly wouldn't be profitable for their market price if it weren't for getting the memory for cheap second hand or salvaged or whatever it is exactly they do.

 

Since they're OTP EPROM they couldnt' have been salvaged. Maybe they were stolen from the Macronix factory or could be discount 8M rejects, or purchased in huge huge quantities. I think otherwise the mid 90s cost would probably be at least US$20, pricey for bootlegging materials.

 

those look like 4Mbit = 512KB (27C4000) chips. ergo having 6 of em gives you 3MB It's really impressive how they manufactured their own PCB for 6 chips. those would be ideal for modding

 

If you look at the other side there are 2 more for 8 total. The game is 4 megabytes. The long chip on the side of the ROMs is SRAM. One of the three small chips at the bottom is a CiC clone, the other two handle mapping of ROM and SRAM. They must have had a great deal on the 512kb chips because using 8 chips to bootleg this game is pretty insane the more I think about it. Even using four 1024kb chips would be pretty bad.