The dips should be in the wrong positions....games on that board won't play otherwise without them being in the correct position...but that's a pretty sweet find

Any idea what the correct settings are?  Do you know of any online reference site that would show possible dip settings?  I would really like to get this thing up and running if at all possible.

Here's a pic of the pcb (ignore the crude sticker work please):


Evan, you can feel free to add this to the article.  Sorry it took so long, things have been pretty crazy around here.

Well, there's only 4 dips so you should be able to try all combos eventually

1111
1112
1121
1211
2111
1122
2211
2121
1212
2222
2221
2212
2122
1222
etc...

I updated the page now that I have had a second look at it.  The game is "playable" if you replace the 6th chip with the equivalent data from the Donkey Kong Country Competition Cart.  Unfortunately, if you compare the two binaries, it becomes clear that there is corruption on every chip that was dumped.  I think it could be as simple as one of the pins is not connected properly.  The sixth chip is the most problematic as there is an offset in the data, which cannot really be fixed because it causes some of the data to become cut off.

That being said, if this is dumped properly, I fully expect it to not be identical to final, as the checksum in the header is different.

That's crazy, it's very rare to find EPROMS just gone like that, I know everyone talks about "bit rot" and all that, but with all the arcade stuff I have been dealing with over the years with EPROMS I would say less than 1% had EPROM issues that needed to be reburned on hardware that is much older than this...

I actually think it is extremely common. In my recent set of six prototype releases, two of them (including the DKC CC) had corruption in them. In the other one (Battle Blaze) the corruption was subtle, and only involved one 256 byte section, but it was there. I probably would not have noticed if it weren't for the fact that the prototype had previously been dumped.

That being said, I hope that a redump of the chips might prove that the corruption was due to a bad dump.  Cross our fingers?