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Flash carts work on the same general principle of an emulator in that it just is a tool to fire up a crap ton of roms sitting in a directory which have zero personal, cash, or intrinsic value to most. I won't touch them anymore, rather have a couple of my multicarts around and keep real carts or bootlegs around for the stuff I truly like. I'm vastly more inclined to bother playing them in that way and I know I'm not alone.

My thing is that I'm as much a collector as I am a gamer. If my concern were strictly just playing the games, then I'd be all over multicarts and flash carts. I like to have the original games on my shelf, though. It's just a personal preference.

I mainly use my flash carts for games that are rediculously expensive, I'd never pay over a $100 for a single NES cart. $500 for Little Samson? No thanks. Also it is awesome for playing games that got fan translations and there are a ton of really fun fan rom hacks like Mario Adventure which is a terrific rom hack of SMB 3, or Metroid Zero Mission which is a port of the NES metroid onto the SNES using Super Metroid assets. Also there are rom hacks of exsisting games that fix issues with the real games, like Castlevania 2 redacted which makes the game suck considerably less and is actually enjoyable. I simply use my flash carts as a supplement to my collecting think of it as a diet control pill, It is much easier to wait on a killer deal on a real cart when I can play that game anytime I like on my flash cart.

I'm just saying I see little difference between pirate multicarts and flash carts but to each their own.

IMHO pirate carts are only worth maybe $5 at most for the usual ### in 1 Famicom nonsense. Maybe a bit more for later systems, ones that are better made, or have a boxe and such to go with them. Since they are minimally altered stolen ROM images with some menu front end, they were probably produced at a cost of 50 cents or less and sold by vendors for a few bucks at most in the East. Those pirate Famicom carts are shockingly cheap inside. At least the ones that I have or have seen inside.

Well one thing to consider is there are two real levels of old asian piracy when it came to fakes and that holds true in the famicom era and then now with the GBA expired. Back on the famicom there were a heap of famiclones made, single shot games of real legit releases but bootlegged. Some of them used the cheap crap glop top (black blob) tech to keep costs down, but around that some used original parts(somewhat modded at times) to have the games on real boards with real chips without cutting corners. I've got Mario Baby (Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa) and Dream Mario (SMB2j...also had Crisis Force) that are setup this way and they're solid, yet I also have Moon Crystal using glop top tech. Mario aside they're all prohibitively expensive in cart format, saved me a fortune going that route. GBA has in recent years got into this, the chinese using real boards only with a gloptop in the center as a multiplexor for the data to/from the pinouts into the system to make new games or bootlegs like the popular Mother 3 floating around and also my Dragon Quest Monsters Caravan Heart in english.

Hobie-wan wrote:IMHO pirate carts are only worth maybe $5 at most for the usual ### in 1 Famicom nonsense. Maybe a bit more for later systems, ones that are better made, or have a boxe and such to go with them. Since they are minimally altered stolen ROM images with some menu front end, they were probably produced at a cost of 50 cents or less and sold by vendors for a few bucks at most in the East. Those pirate Famicom carts are shockingly cheap inside. At least the ones that I have or have seen inside.

Tanooki wrote:Some of them used the cheap crap glop top (black blob) tech to keep costs down, but around that some used original parts(somewhat modded at times) to have the games on real boards with real chips without cutting corners.

Agree, the bootleg carts are usually made of cheap parts to keep costs down. However, if it means obtaining a hard to find out of print expensive game such as Tengen Tetris or exclusive imports, I do not see a problem buying them.

ElkinFencer10 wrote:Now, I know that some NES cartridges have these 60-pin to 72-pin converters inside them, but I never really liked the idea of cannibalizing cartridges (not to mention that it seems like it would be a pain and beyond my capability to jury rig a working converter since I'm not really willing to Frankenstein NES and Famicom cartridges.

One disadvantage of the external adapters is an extra plug connection; two "carts" that can wiggle causing a game freeze. At least going the Gyromite adapter approach, the Famicom PCB can be locked down with screws inside the large NES game cart case.

I wonder about the "bubble sealed chips" of pirate carts compared to the normally seen chips soldered on official game cart PCBs. I noticed the early Nintendo Gyromite carts used the same bubble seal chips, both the Bootleg and Nintendo carts still work decades later.

Early Nintendo Gyromite on left, bootleg cart on right

MN12Bird always has cool vids. Ran across this today & thought of your thread.

Posting via mobile if link doesn't work:
Play Japanese Famicom games on American NES: http://youtu.be/AZJ03PqY2jY

I have a couple of decent quality famicom bootlegs. But they still work even after 10-15 years those cheap bastards still do their job

Also it is awesome to get some expensive games to play it on real hardware.

I really was just interested in the converter. The bootleg cart is just a novelty for me. I just wanted to be able to test and play around with it, and the bootleg cart was the only Famicom cart he had.

Tanooki wrote:I won't touch them anymore, rather have a couple of my multicarts around and keep real carts or bootlegs around for the stuff I truly like.

Someone get this guy an Everdrive N8 please...