I went back to a retro game store today to exchange a defective copy of Pin-Bot and everything was going smoothly. The shop owner was happily exchanging the $4 game but strangely contradicted me when I suggested that "these things are hard to kill so maybe it got zapped by lightning or something." It took me a minute to realize that she had claimed to clean and test every game and that my suggestion accidentally implied that she didn't. I honestly wasn't even thinking about that and was just thinking that they are so hard to kill that it would take something like lightning (no reason to test everything). Later the same day I have now have proof that she absolutely does not, but it's a lot more curious than that.

Anyway, while she couldn't get the other copy of Pin-Bot to work in her clone system I spent the better part of an hour going through the wall of NES games finding every $0.99 game pak. I recently told my friend that "any NES game is worth $1 if not just for the PCB and shell" so that he would get anything he sees priced like that at the flea market when he is there without me. Since then he's found a lot of good deals for me including $0.50 for games like Mike Tyson's Punch--Out!!, so I thought it was a good call. Today, I put my money where my mouth was and ended up with 26 dupes (+1 I didn't have before)! While I was there I also bought 9 other games I didn't own yet. When I was cleaning and testing them everything worked except for one copy of NES Play Action Football (out of several dupes).

The best I could get was garbled graphics which were decidedly different from the kind of garbled graphics you might get from a bad/dirty connection. I suspected a bad CHR so I tried to see if the game could start. When I actually gave it time to start up I heard two distinct tones and immediately recognized the fake-out reset from Sunsoft's Batman! Sure enough, the sustained tone ended and the song continued. I can't see anything but it's Batman alright!

So I assumed that a past user had swapped the PCB to ditch a broken game. I looked for external signs that the pak had been opened and didn't see anything. I opened it and found that it was, indeed, a Batman board, but not the one on Bootgod [I now see how to see additional profiles on Bootgod]. This one is TLROM and MMC3B instead of NES-B4 and MMC3A. The chips look factory soldered and the screws gave that satisfying "snap" that they give if they've never been removed before. Could this have been a label mix-up?

Now, as for why the board didn't work:



It looks like someone didn't know how to get into the game pak and tried to pull it out with pliers! Yeah, uh, there is NO WAY this woman tested that and confirmed it working. I wouldn't care about whether it was tested or not except that she went out of her way and even contradicted me to protect/perpetuate the lie. I don't appreciate that. [well, she went out of business a few months later after years of operation and now I miss it  ]

gnarly... wait, there's still retro stores that sell games for $1? way to bury the lead

As you might expect, it was entirely golf, baseball, football, and basketball games.


Literally Golf, NFL Football, Baseball, and Ultimate Basketball...
...and Jack Nicklaus Golf, John Elway's Quarterback, Major League Baseball, and Hoops...
...and Bandai Golf, NES Play Action Football, and... you get the picture.

Ultimate Basketball is not in the pic because it's with the other pick-ups:


They only had one, I didn't already own it, and it got added to the collection.

I always laugh inside when I hear "we clean all the games". Ya right. Maybe MAYBE the ones in the glass case. But the commons get no love.

I'm just glad the commons shelve is available for me to physically browse. Some stores have ALL the NES games behind glass. "Uh, ya can you pull out every single 5 screw cartridge for me".

Oh and I hate it when they want to clean the pins for you and there comes the bottle of brasso. I always stop them and they either get kinda offended or baffled.

No idea. Batman's a good game, save those roms!

hard to believe me but a game store called Warp zone in ohio cleans every single nes game they get. Trust me, they have the cleanest looking games inside and out 
 

I guess if you wanted to see if it plays you could get a game genie or something(nes>famicom>famicom>nes converter) with a socket on it and wire up the traces that've been nerfed

or if you wanted to do alot of work for cheaper you could just cut all the traces on one of your sports titles and frakenstien it on this board with every trace(might be hard to fit in cart)

Well, I looked in my other copies of Batman and they are all TLROM like this despite the one on BootGod being some "B4" PCB so it looks like I have the common one and not the variant I originally suspected. It plays but plays garbled because the CHR pins are incomplete. I can desolder the chips and swap it to another MMC3 board 
 
Definitely. I already had three copies and play it often.

Heh, I have a PCB of NES Play Action Football with no shell. (No, it didn't come in a Batman cart.)