Hello!
I am still a novice in the field of NES games. But I have now received an offer to buy a rare NES game. I would like to make sure that this is not fake. For this reason, the seller has given me pictures of the board. I would like to hear your views on whether it is an original or a fake. Here are the pictures:
Thanks in advance!
Looks like all the NES boards I've seen. What sort of fakery are you concerned about? If you don't trust the seller, then him linking you to pictures of a NES board doesn't tell you anything about what he would actually send you.
As I said, I do not know exactly what I have to looking for. So I thought, I'll ask the experts
I will be allowed to see the game before buying. But if there already is a doubt, I could have saved myself the effort.
Looks real to me, unless pirates and reproer's are going out of their way to get MASK ROM's.
If it's a rare game, I'd be more worried about the label being a reprint or not.
Yes, it's very rare. I will request some pictures from the complete module and the label.
Check
BootGods databasefor the PCB scan to compare...
Label is much more important. PAL Stadium Events isn't worth nearly as much as NTSC Stadium Events.
I thought that the 6113 chip on the left side is an american lockout chip. Is this true? In that case the modul must be NTSC!?
Looks like a real stadium events board. Like I said, the label may have been replaced check that out the most. Other then that you should be safe.
Here is a picture from the cartridge:
I compared it with the one from BootGods DB. They seem to be identic.
65024U wrote:
Looks real to me, unless pirates and reproer's are going out of their way to get MASK ROM's.
I guess really all they would need is a way to print onto the ICs, because I doubt anyone can tell the difference between a plastic EPROM and plastic MaskROM (without removing the plastic..). Pretty unlikely to happen though, unless this things start showing up in quantity.
Edited because it is now obviously fake. I feel stupid for not seeing that earlier. -.-
Yeah the pictures look legit to me too, mainly for reasons already mentioned: soldering is very clean, doesn't look reworked, and it would be difficult (or cost prohibitive, at least) to fake the mask ROMs. The 6113 in there with an 8811 datecode is a little surprising, that would seem to suggest there was an additional mfg run(s) of the game. The date still makes sense though, it's still well before the release of World Class Track Meet.
FYI, The SE cart in the DB isn't mine, the hash was verified by one of the lost levels guys and the scans are compliments of NintendoAge. I don't like to kludge things into the DB like that, but that's one cart I'm not buying!
I have an idea....Say taking the cart apart lowers the value because it's one less time the screws can be taken out....just trying to help.
And 2 runs? Interesting.....Maybe there's hope of finding more of these yet....I'd like one for cheap.
basitsch wrote:
As I said, I do not know exactly what I have to looking for. So I thought, I'll ask the experts ;)
I meant, do you not trust the seller? Or do you trust him fully but want to be sure you know exactly what he's selling you, in case he's mistaken about its genuineness? These are questions we can't answer. I asked because those call for different actions.
I am very grateful for your help and the various clues.
@blargg
I trust the seller. But it could be that he has even bought a fake and do not know. Therefore, I try to minimize the risk.
@BootGod
If you like, I can make some photos or scans for your database (after buying).
OT: I noticed something strange in the database. The text says: mirroring horizontal. But on both boards there is a soldering point at V. I expected that these soldering points switching the mirroring. Or I'm wrong?
Mirroring solder pads on Nintendo boards are marked using the "arrangement" naming convention, not the "mirroring" naming convention invented by pirates and archivists. See
Mirroring to learn why the "V" solder pad means horizontal mirroring.
Thank you for the link. At first i was a little bit confused
basitsch wrote:
Hello!
I am still a novice in the field of NES games. But I have now received an offer to buy a rare NES game. I would like to make sure that this is not fake. For this reason, the seller has given me pictures of the board. I would like to hear your views on whether it is an original or a fake. Here are the pictures:
http://www.sdjg.de/se/100_3811.JPGhttp://www.sdjg.de/se/100_3812.JPGThanks in advance!
Unfortunately I think that board is a fake.
If you look at the PCB around the PRG/CHR ROM pins, the chips have been replaced. They used a hollow tipped desoldering gun to do it. The PCB has some delamination around the holes. Said delamination occurs when you use one of these irons. The one I use produces the exact same kind of damage to the PCB around the holes.
The same damage is not present around the 74161 or the lockout chip's pads.
All they had to do was clean the flux off the board using some alcohol to remove the evidence of rework, but they couldn't fix the damaged PCB material around the pads.
If the PAL stadium events board uses the same ROMs as the NTSC one, then they most likely are transplants. The later lockout chip date kinda bears out that that the board was a donor.
I'm highly suspicious that there's no cartridge case / label to look at either.
As for chip markings, these days laser marking of chips is cheap and easy, and you have to be super careful. There's a bunch of chinese outfits that make fake chips. They just take any old chip and laser mark the part number you're looking for on them. I've seen this with SID chips and a few others. Of course, the chips don't do anything useful when you plug it in, other than maybe smoke, or damage what you put it in.
Not saying these chips were re marked but just keep in mind the above if you see any suspicious chips that were laser marked. Laser marking was popular near the end of the NES' rein, and I've seen it on MMCx chips and now and again ROMs but never the lockout chips, though it is possible that later ones had it.
In another forum they have just come to the same result. But the title screen shows clearly 'U.S. version'. Therefore, it couldn't be a Pal-Rom?
basitsch wrote:
In another forum they have just come to the same result. But the title screen shows clearly 'U.S. version'. Therefore, it couldn't be a Pal-Rom?
Well the proof's in the cartridge label then. I guess it's possible that nintendo transplanted ROMs from famicom cartridges, if it had the same ROMs (does it exist, and if so use the same ROMs?) I'm still thinking something is fishy with it. I doubt nintendo would swap out ROMs on boards like that. you'd think if the reused ROMs, they would've put them on new boards instead of recycling old ones, or used those fami to nes adapters like you find in some gyromites.
I think it's highly odd someone would sell it based on PCB pics and not the label pics. Who'd just yank a board and sell it that way and say that they have the case, too? Sorta like selling your car by ripping the engine out and putting it in the ad. "for sale: one engine. also included: car body"
Oh, there is a picture of the label. I posted it some messages before:
Without knowing much about boards, just looking at the pic, I would say it's definitely a fake.
I am going to vote for completely and obviously FAKE. There are far more problems than I am noting here, I just won't be helping the creator rip off more people.
1 - Date code on lockout and mapper is wrong, and there is no way there were 2 runs of this game. The next fake will probably have this fixed.
2 - Soldering on PRG/CHR is completely different than lockout/mapper, which have nice cones from pad to pin on both sides. The next fake might have more time invested to do it better.
3 - Board code is wrong, should be CNROM 256 02. Also easy to fix in the next fake.
4 - The divots in the PRG/CHR chips look way too short and the ejection marks are also too small. That probably means an OTP ROM was polished and printed with new letters. It will be harder for the creator to find matching chips.
5 - The worst is the label, which is very obviously fake. There are large gaps on the left side and bottom. The bottom left corner isn't rounded right. On the left side you can see a strip of white where they didn't cut straight. Again there are many other problems that I won't write here. Just the above, without seeing the board, is enough to know its home made.
You should seriously post the sellers info, because they will try to rip off more people with more fraud carts.
Yes yes yes I see this all now. That was a heck of a clean up on the de-soldering. :/ Wow.....And yeah the lable is off center VERY far to the right, and the bottom left curved edge is chipped, not curved. Wow.......Somebody has too much time on their hands. This is too damn close, and they even tried to fake the board to even try to fool the people smart enough to look at it for legitimation.
I have never used a soldering iron so there's never spots like that on the board but it is obvious now, I just didn't look for that last time. I never can get the solder to look old like that when i do soldering, so it looked like the real deal to me. Sorry, man. I could have cost you a lot of money. -.-
It amaze me how far people can go to dupe people for just a "piece of plastic". I guess it must be worth that much money to try to fake it.
But now that we know people go that far, the rabbit holes can go deep... Sorry to be rude but how much can we know now if "counterfeiter" will not come to this board and show their "work" and ask if this cart look legitimate or not under the context that "I want to buy it but I'm not sure if it's fake" just to make sure it look like the real deal and be able to sell it?
Sorry if I'm accusing almost directly the original poster but, you now, it's a new user, we don't know his history and now the "cat is out of the bag". Those rabbit holes can go deep. I have a good memory about the last case of the Kid icarus fake thingy with the same user with 2 accounts trying to validate his claim...
Damn, I just keep seeing the limits of my skepticism here. Everyone keeps raising new things I wouldn't have considered at all. I'm amazed. Not that the person selling this cartridge has to be the person who posted here; he can just search over the five posts to different boards that the original poster here made and see the responses to know where he needs to improve next time. People on another board caught these same issues, and put up some
nice pictures circling them.
Yeah, they will try to fix these flaws, getting the outside of the cart perfect will just require a little more time and effort. But as for changing PROM's onto the board with the right date and not having solder mistakes or solder that is all new and shiney and not 20 years old will be hard. It would probably cost more then the cart's sale value, but a solder bath would just make this nearly impossible to find any differences, because even the chips that wouldn't need messed with would look exactly the same, too.
If it gets any worse then this, I'm starting to feel scared about buying rare carts. At least ones with normal hardware that is easily found in other games.
But even a perfect cart, nearly like this, but just more refined, will have some stuff you just can't hide. We just have to be able to spot them, which until the next cart pops up, is anyones guess as to what the one difference will be.
Thanks again for your help. Now i sure that this is a fake.
>Sorry if I'm accusing almost directly the original poster but, you now
I can understand your doubts well. But you should know that I'm only active in about 4 boards. 2 with the subject model building, 1 with the subject health, 1 with the subject C64 and 1 with the subject SNES. All of these boards couldn't help me, so i decided to register in some NES-Boards (NesDev, Nes-Forum, NintendoFans). This is the reason why i am a new user.
I would say that i delete the Pictures of the board and the module immediatly. Maybe we could delete all detailed information in this thread?
I asked the seller (a friend of mine, living in the netherlands / i live in germany) about this game. He told me that he bought this game two years ago. He send me the pictures that i can figure out whether it is an original or not. He don't want to cheat me, because he was not even sure if it's original. He thought that the former price for this game was to low.
I don't see why it would be weird that the price of a random old sport game is low. Even if the cart is rare or something, the seller might just not know about it, selling games he hasn't used for a long while and is never going to touch again.
The cart on the pics is definitely a real one. However, nothing proves what he's selling you is what is on the pics and that's the real danger. Although they have been cases of guys selling carts like Seiken Densetsu 3 (labelled Secret of Mana 2) very expensive with everything fake, including the pictures, but not mentionning it is fake. This pisses me off. In real life everyone is pissed about NES games and keeps saying me I should get into iphone games or something fashionable, but then on the net people are so creepy and sell fake rare NES games expensive.
Haha dumb question, why are they mad at your NES games? XD
And yeah, it is prissy. Faking something so good....and the sad thing is that if this guy isn't the scammer (It's possible, not that I think you are) just says that the pirate that made this cart is 2 years ago and should have these mistakes fixed and cleaned up, which is very scary. I'd hate to see how good these pirates get.
At least I got my Flintstones 2 game for cheap somewhere (I assume) I had it before I knew it was rare.
I wish I'd of remembered finding it, because now that I know it's uber rare, I'd of had the rush of finding it in the wild. I've never found another super rare game yet. XD
@basitsch:
It's good that you didn't take my comment the wrong way. What I'm concerned is that possible bootleggers may now use this forum as a "proving ground" since some knowledgeable people can identity them.
@Bunnyboy:
I don't like usually removing contents from thread but in this case I would suggest that you remove the one from your post unless this is already well known information on the net.
Banshaku wrote:
@Bunnyboy:
I don't like usually removing contents from thread but in this case I would suggest that you remove the one from your post unless this is already well known information on the net.
He claims he already removed a bunch before he posted the five points that he did post. So even if bootleggers do make better fakes, he can leak the known defects slowly.
Are there any tips for making a commercialized homebrew game harder to fake, using the tech we have today that Nintendo didn't have? Given that homebrew is written to OTP or flash, not a mask ROM, would a serial number work?
Well for the NES to read it, you have to have something the NES to read so it's hard to say. :/
Wow, they really did go thru great lengths to fake this. Given kevtris and bunnyboys points, I have to to agree it is fake too. I noticed the bit of delamination on the thru-holes that kevtris mentioned, but it still soldering sill looked very good, so I kinda disregarded it.
The datecodes were the only things that really jumped at me as out of place, given the lengths the faker went thru with this cart, I'm surprised he missed that.
tepples wrote:
Are there any tips for making a commercialized homebrew game harder to fake, using the tech we have today that Nintendo didn't have? Given that homebrew is written to OTP or flash, not a mask ROM, would a serial number work?
If I ever finish my game, and have it fabricated, I would like to have a unique serial number in each game (possibly displayed on the game's main menu or credits screen). The serial # might even be part of the seed for the random number generator. I don't know why I would do this though. The idea just seemed kinda cool.
I doubt it'd possible to stop it from being pirated in anyway, besides a super-custom secret mapper on board.
tepples wrote:
Are there any tips for making a commercialized homebrew game harder to fake, using the tech we have today that Nintendo didn't have? Given that homebrew is written to OTP or flash, not a mask ROM, would a serial number work?
Use a PIC or other MCU with code protection. Not impossible to break, but not cheap and probably a DMCA violation if one did. Lots of arcade games did this, I'm sure some are still protected/unemulated.
Easy low tech solution would be to buy only new ROMs, and keep track of the ROM date codes used for each run. That would be hard to match.
I can't see a serial # inside the NES PRG-ROM being of much use (for this specific purpose) because it's easy to fake or just use the same one repeatedly. But how to check it? Letting people verify that their cart serial is legit would also allow pirates to verify that the serial # they came up with is legit.
Memblers wrote:
I can't see a serial # inside the NES PRG-ROM being of much use (for this specific purpose) because it's easy to fake or just use the same one repeatedly. But how to check it? Letting people verify that their cart serial is legit would also allow pirates to verify that the serial # they came up with is legit.
My goal would not be to stop pirates. Piracy is unavoidable. I assume that all carts get pirated quickly. The goal would be to release some number of carts as a "limited production run" to stimulate sales. I would probably officially release the ROM with a different serial # / rand # seed. I would hope that some number of NES enthusiasts would purchase a cart to have an "authentic" one.
With the original Garage Cart I did a limited run (mostly because I gave a number initially and didn't want to make a liar out of myself, heheh). In my experience, a truly limited run benefits your supporters (the purchasers) primarily. Garage Cart #1 sells for as much as 20 times what I sold it for, which I think is awesome, but maybe it's value is helped by it being "the original/first homebrew cart".
So yeah, from your buyers point of view they surely will be concerned with how easily (or not) the cart can be faked, because it affects the resale value. I don't think it's a likely issue in reality, but in perception, sure. So there are a lot of little things you can do, that together add up to make it more authentic. Expect your buyers to ask. Like on Garage Cart, among other stuff I printed the label at my printers max 2400x1200 DPI (the .PNG file I think is 70MB or so). It includes a lot of fine details, so good luck to whoever wants to try and copy that optically, heheh. I wrote serial #s on the label instead of in the ROM, then later found out that I can barely read my own handwriting and also mistakenly put out the same serial # twice, haha (when I had an opportunity to identify/authenticate a cart someone had).
Oh yeah, another thing I could have mentioned in the last post too was that one could use a custom board. Doesn't even need to be a custom mapper. It would make the cart a little more special, and it's cheaper than one might think (I'm willing to do custom boards for people, almost for free if it's NES..).
BTW, some unlicensed NES cart makers used to release carts where the part #s are scratched off the ICs. Not all that helpful these days maybe with 74xx parts being super-easy to identify (even automatically with the right tool). Other companies also were far more devious and used not custom labeled, but falsely-labeled ICs!
If this game runs.....how did he get NES MASK ROM's?
Surprised nobody else asked....
They are presumably OTP EPROM's, which basically look just like mask ROMs, then they polished off the text and printed new text on.
But isn't there...what...two pins different?
At these sizes, EPROM and Nintendo mask ROM have the same pinout.
Oh...wow. I thought over 8K on the CHR-ROM needed some pins swapped, not 32K....sorry! -is a n00b-
Heh, you could ask to try the cart out, and write some "this is a fake" message somewhere into the OTP, and patch it to display. "No way I could have done that if it weren't a take. Give me my money back."
@blargg: That would be hilarious. It really would.
As far as copy-protecting NES games, it's really a lost cause in some respects. I know alot of people will disagree with me, but personally I think that the modern age just makes copy protection a waste of time. The internet make distribution of information and software easy and inevitable and just speeds up the time it takes for people to collaborate and crack protection schemes. And of course, if you're a low wage worker in China or Hong Kong who has access to tools it kinda makes it very easy to make a few extra bucks even if you sell your counterfeits for a few dollars less than optimum price.
And as for new games, I understand the desire to make it copy protected, but if I was selling a new game I wouldn't bother wasting my time or money with copy protection. I'd start out by releasing the game on cartridge, and then wait for a while and release the ROM later on after my limited supply of carts runs out. The people who would have bought a cartridge will probably still do so just for the sheer novelty of it, and the leeches and lamers will still just hack it and play in an emulator sooner or later.
As far as new carts being collectibles, you could always just hand autograph the inside of each cartridge and serialize them. Each serial number would have a unique signature, so unless the bootlegger had photos of the inside of every single NES cartridge and then also knew which ones wouldn't be accounted for online he wouldn't be able to fake it.
Haha, random font per each cart using a formula that only you know and put it in each cart....That'd be as close as possible as fool-proof. XD Especially comparing cart stamped numbers to fonts. I'd want to explode!
If one does their own quality control (highly recommended), then the build quality of the cart is about as effective a signature too, I believe. Just using a unique PCB would be a big step in that direction. Heh on the last NES board layout I prototyped, I have "Garage Cart #2" silk-screened onto it. If you do a through-hole design, you could have a gold-plated signature/logo/graphic, no kidding.
(you'd want a solder coating for surface-mount though). I figured why not, it doesn't cost anything extra, and I figured it would be dumb to limit my future possibilities to a single mapper/board by (prematurely) planning to reuse it for anything else.
Yeah copy protection for games sounds like a waste of time. Really the only use I see for it is more towards security with internet applications. Any kind of online game for example, would become useless if anyone can just easily hack the ROMs to cheat and/or screw up the game for others. Same goes for almost any kind of online services (with fake servers, etc.). None of that stuff exists of course, and also the way I would do it probably makes it transparent to the NES itself, but I'm sure that same sort of feature used for authentication could be made to work as a protection thing somehow.
Yeah. Like Williams arcade boards, had a nifty W inside it.
And, how much would a run of 100 NES-Quality boards cost?
The pricing is totally dependent on the size of the board. My tiny UNROM board (about the size of an NROM board), IIRC was under 75 cents. Add maybe $100 in setup cost (one-time fee) and shipping, so around $1.75 a board for 100 of them.
I think the board-area cost for full-size cart when I made the old Squeedo (fills up the entire cart shell) was about $3.50. But that was a pretty large board.
That is not bad at all!
Wow....hmm...interesting. c: