NINTENDO
GAMEBOY
PIRATE CARTRIDGE
In Europe is easy to find multigames pirate cartridges for a
multitude of systems. Not so easy is to find pirate carts with only
one game. Some time ago I found one: a pirate Star Trek The 25th
Anniversary cart! Unfortunately the guy that sold me this game gave
me the cart only... the package was trashed!
<Click on the image to see a bigger
pic.>
It is similar to standard Nintendo carts but it has some little
cosmetics differences you could easily see in the picture below in
which I confronted the pirated cartridge with an official USA game,
Solar Striker:
In particular the label is very different: it is only a
scansion of the original Instruction Booklet front
page!.
Inside the cart. Note the chip with the sticker on it (the rom
with the game). The second chip inside was made by Texas Instruments.
This pirate cart was easy to open since it did not used custom screws
but regular ones.
<Click on the image to see a bigger
pic.>
An interesting fact about this pirate cart: it could drain
completely new batteries of a Gameboy Pocket in a couple of hours
(instead of the usual 10 hours!). Also the cart is a little too big
and is not easy to insert in the system.
Other carts were popular until few years ago but were all multicarts.
I never bought any of them because they were very expensive (some
were sold at more than 100 US$!!!!). Lately I saw some GameBoy Color
multicarts sold at nearly 50 US$. They seems to be more common than
old B/W games-only carts!
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Pedrazzini
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