Your guide is spot-on for US games. I'll add what I can.
The following games are in fact EEPROM games, on SHVC-*P** boards:
* Kunio-Kun no Dodgeball da yo! Zen'in Shuugou - Tournament Special
* From TV Animation - Slam Dunk! Shueisha Limited
Both of these will have phillips screws, and the EEPROMs will *not* be socketed.
Any other prototype game will be EEPROM (look for a serial stamp of SHVC-*P**-**, make sure there are no wires or obvious resoldering spots.)
Every other limited edition game (500 or less copies) are always MaskROM.
The following games have golden clamshells:
* Kunio-Kun no Dodgeball da yo! Zen'in Shuugou - Tournament Special
* Super Tetris 2 + Bombliss (there is a gray normal one too)
* Super Bomberman 2 - Caravan
* Super Bomberman 5 - Corocoro Comic
All four of these have only the *outer* shell spray painted gold. If you open the cart up, the insides will be gray, and it's usually a pretty bad job of painting so the gold to gray lines are uneven. This is just how these are, and it's perfectly legit. I've had six different gold carts from six sellers, all the same way. Others have confirmed the same thing. They were cheap in making these, because they were all limited 200 or less run games.
Kunio, Bomberman 2 and Bomberman 5 have custom ROM data and custom label art, so these are hard to fake.
Tetris 2 is much easier to fake, it's identical to the retail game. Be very careful buying this one.
Best I can tell you is to get the other gold carts to compare, and make sure the gold is inside the screw holes too. Sometimes shoddy fakes won't get the paint in the screw holes and you'll see gray there. (Like that Yam-Yam fake. Speaking of that, any Yam-Yam gold cart you ever see is fake. Only one exists, inside Mandarake-Japan, and they won't sell it to anyone.)
The Japanese modem-based games (JRA PAT, JRA PAT Wide) have FlashROM memory chips inside of them, but are not fake. Their cartridge shells are black.
Nintendo Power games come in white clamshells, and use FlashROM chips.
SA-1, SuperFX and Cx4 games sometimes have very tiny MaskROMs (see the pic above), the reduced pinout gives them more board space for other stuff.
Mega Man X2 is SHVC-2DC0N (two MaskROM chips), and Mega Man X3 is SHVC-1DC0N (one MaskROM chip.)
Any ROM chip that is entirely blank (surface writing removed) is from a fake board.
However, not all boards will have serial numbers and model numbers on the ROM chips.
Majesco is particularly bad here, you will see "FAMILY FEUD" only, stamped onto the ROM on their version of said game.
Most PCBs are dark green. Some from EA/Majesco/Maxi will be blue or really light green. But you'll see EA-, MJSC-, MAXI-, SHVC-, SNS-, SNSP- stamped on the board somewhere in gold letters.
Much more insidious are fake boxes and manuals. Since those triple the cost of loose games, you'll see a lot more fakes here. Usually copies are duller, in "too good to be true" mint condition, blurrier, poorly aligned, etc. But some are amazingly good copies. Your best bet here is to scan at 600DPI and verify that it has the screening effect typical of industrial printers. Someone making small runs of boxes is unlikely to be using the same printing process as Nintendo did in the '90s.
Edited: 04/30/2013
at 06:15 PM
by byuu
