Found this today in a lot of stuff I had sitting around, and I noticed that the label peeling showed another label underneath it! Even weirder is when I opened it...
 







 
What is this? I tested it, and it seems the just be a normal Super Mario Bros. cartridge, but the stuff going on with the cart says otherwise.

SMB label peeling to reveal an identical one underneath is creeeeeeepy......

Matt and I have come across a bunch of similar carts (6 maybe?) while doing repro work. Retail games with 1 or 2 EPROMs inside. My best guess, and I have nothing to back this up, is that they were either repairs done for defective games returned to Nintendo or they were were fixed after failing a quality check.

Never seen the double label thing though, that one is new to me.

yeah that is strange to be double labeled then have a hand written label on the board?????????

^^^^ Dude, we just posted at the exact same second. Sweet!

can you cleanly peel the label off to see if there is a change or a mistake on it?

haha that is awesome! why did mine go up first? alphabetical order of user name?

Ninsurrection

My money would be on exactly this.

I would also suspect the original label was damaged somehow, and they were too lazy to take the old one off.  Kind of like Myriad.

Pretty neat. I wonder if they did this with extra eproms or had them on order for games that used standard eproms and needed repair as it obviously had another label on the top. Very cool, but yeah seems to be a repair cart.

Very cool, thanks for sharing!

Yeah, I remember reading about these. I can't remember the full story, but either it was as suggested (they were replacing defective carts), or that they ran out of MASK ROMs.

It could have been a repair from a Service Center as well, they were able to order replacement labels for any game.

Eww those contacts. XD Soldering is definitely hand-done. At first, I thought maybe the laminate was tearing off part of the print, which happens in some cases of carts, but this isn't the case. Definitely a cart to hold on to.

Nice find.

Even though it is not a proto, it still a cool cart. I would hold on to it.

Basically, there are 2 chips in the nrom-256-XX: the prg and chr. Chr stores the sprites while prg stores the game.

By replacing the prg chip with an EPROM, you can change the game. That's how you can get Super Mario Frustration onto a nintendo cart. In this case, it seems this chip was used to repair a defective prg chip. The shoddy (non-mechanical) soldering job supports this. Whether it was done by nintendo or a 3rd party, I don't know. All I can say is that it isn't a prototype :/

Btw, if you are interested, I do have SM Frustration carts for sale, if you want to rage on an actual nes

The thing I don't understand is this: If it was just a simple repair, why did they take the time to produce another label to go over the original one? That seems a little unnecessary. Unless perhaps it was purchased in bad condition and Nintendo (or someone else?) was just lazy?

I didn't realize I never posted pictures of my similar PCBs:







All chips are visibly hand soldered with the exception of the NEC Japan chips. Again, I'm guessing they are the product of someone (1st or 3rd party) repairing defective games, but have no proof to support this. The double label is one of the more interesting aspect of this whole thing.

I believe the purpose of the labeling has a few reasons:

1. If the eprom is removed in the future, it can be identified via the label (for example, you would know that the chip is a PRG or CHR)
2. The label blocks the eprom window, preventing the data from being damaged from sunlight (not much of a problem inside a cart)

Also, it seems that if not all the chips are eproms, it is most likely not a prototype. Looks more like a repair job (or even possibly a mod )

I'm familiar with how windowed EPROMs work, but only two of them (the two NROM games with hand written stickers) are windowed EPROMs, so that doesn't make sense.



Naw, that's not even remotely close to being true.  I have plenty of protos with CHR RAM on them with EPROMs.


These games were pulled from production carts and the game on the PCB is identical to the game on the label.  If someone "modded" a Golf cartridge by removing the PRG, programming an EPROM and soldering it in place with the same data, only for it to function exactly as it did originally (albeit with a much sorter shelf life), they're one of the shittiest modders around.