Here is an obvious fake:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/162601451...

Edit: This is not an obvious fake. My mistake. It could be a sample.

Is it fake, or is it a final version sample/promo? Even though the pcb is retail, could the guy's story be legit? That said, it definitely wouldn't be worth prototype money, I know.

Looks like a final promo, but I would not consider it a proto.

I doubt it is fake, but rather the kind of sample that was commonly produced by Nintendo of Europe, judging by the label. Obviously the final maskroms are on there, but they have been hand soldered on.

Other than the sellers story it will be very hard to authenticate this cart for what it is claimed to be. I see this sitting for awhile as the seller looks at offers.

It is real. I have a friend that can validate the seller. He is going to come post here later. Sounds like its a legit final release review copy. Pre-production I am thinking.
 

This what I get for not knowing my PAL as well as I should. To be fair, everything on that board is NTSC.

The only prototypes that have I have seen with that type of label are ones published by Nintendo. As most know, Megaman 5 was published Capcom in the US. I highly doubt that it is an NTSC preproduction prototype.

I didn't realize that Nintendo published Megaman 5 in Europe. It could be an internal sample for (or by) NOE. If that is what it is for, why not put a PAL compatible cic chip in? How long of a gap was there between the NTSC and PAL releases?

I any case it is not an "obvious fake" and I will edit my original post. I would love to learn more about this sample.

Well the cart isnt claiming to be PAL. The front of the label even says NTSC. Maybe I am misunderstandig. I pinged my buddy who says he knows the seller and literally has 1000's of protos. Not sure. I would like to know more also!

Thousands of protos? Tell me more...

I was just informed my friend will be avoiding this discussion like the plague. Too good to talk to us I suppose. Oh well. :-)
 

LOL

Dear Sign Guy's friend,

Please PM me if you have any Shining Force or Landstalker protos.

Hugs and kisses!

-EH

Why would the necessarily produce a PAL version if they were just evaluating whether or not to release the game? They did this with plenty of games, for instance with Earthbound.



Note the style of label is exactly like the Mega Man 5 one in the auction. Also like the Mega Man 5 cart, it has final US maskroms:



But looking at the back, the ROM chips were manually soldered on, like with Mega Man 5:




Enough carts with this style of label have come up to confidently say these were used by Nintendo of Europe for evaulation. Obviously some games never made the cut, like Earthbound. I wouldn't call these prototypes by any means, since they use production MASKROMs, but rather samples for internal evaluation.

What is this thousands of protos you speak of?!

It's legit. I have a very similar one of MM3, from the same seller (Steven78 on NA), and mine is vga graded too.

One reason for a retail version going to Europe is that they needed to check whether it would actually work on the system; in Mega Man 3, the first version (before it was fixed) would glitch out on the final boss on the PAL version. Another reason is to check whether or not the distributor really wanted to distribute the game or not, and decide whether there was a market for the game

Interesting.

Why would you volunteer someone like that? All you've done is show why people don't want to speak up because of this situation. Some people like to be private not annoying with opinions.

My mistake sir. Apologies. Still learning the sensitivities of NA. :-(
 

It's not na sensitivities. It's just common courtesy. 
 

You seem pretty worked up over it.
 

I am saying that this sample was not created before the NTSC production because it includes NTSC production parts.  

It could have been created before PAL production as a part of the European localization process. In that sense it might be considered preproduction.
I am not saying it should have. I am just thinking about how I would have done it, and I wondered why they did it definitely.
 

Just hopping in to say a few things just for informative purposes:

-It's legit as every Megaman 5 NTSC prototype found so far (to my knowledge) looks like this.
-I have this exact prototype.
-Mask roms don't always mean final version(although it's very likely to be final version if you do, but stranger things have happened!)
-In this case it's identical to the final version as you might expect.

I have seen one where the the CHR was a on mask rom, but the PRG was on an EPROM, and that one had differences. I haven't seen one where both were on mask roms being different. Do you have a link? I have also seen one where the mask ROMs looked to be preproduction because they didn't have silk screening. Sadly I can't seem to find any links to these examples. I need to start keeping track of every NES prototype I see.

Yeah the only reason a mask ROM would not match a retail game would be if they caught an error so severe that they had to stop production and throw all the chips away, I'd be very surprised to hear that this happened.

Was it perhaps CHR RAM?

It's possible, but I don't think so. Since I still haven't found the example, I can't be sure.