[help] Castlevania Double Pack GBA Fake?

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ninjainspandex
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Re: [help] Castlevania Double Pack GBA Fake?

Post by ninjainspandex »

lol if he doesn't refund your money tell us his ebay store name so we can get all of racket boy to go in and report his stuff for being counterfeit. I think a hundred or so reports would get his account locked pretty fast don't you think?

Actually give us his name anyway.
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Hobie-wan
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Re: [help] Castlevania Double Pack GBA Fake?

Post by Hobie-wan »

Seems the fakers might have stepped up their game a little on the details. I see a tri-wing screw there and the Nintendo logo on the board looks better than most in the past. Label isn't stretched and has the right code. Are there some letters and numbers stamped into the label though? It doesn't have the sort of 3D brick carved into the left side of the inner top shell though. Most if not all GBA games have that. My real copy of the game does.

FWIW, my real CV Double Pack has an AGB-Y11-02 board. Thicker chip on the left and flatter on the right. Both vertical orientation.
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Ziggy
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Re: [help] Castlevania Double Pack GBA Fake?

Post by Ziggy »

CRTGAMER wrote:The Bootleg on the right is a bit more "glopped" on though. :lol:


I've noticed that too, glop tops on legit things are usually nicely formed while they tend to be more of a amorphous blob on bootlegs and other things that are cheaply made. I'd imagine it's the difference between a machine doing it and someone doing it by hand for small batches- and that someone probably isn't very skilled at what they're doing.

ninjainspandex wrote:perhaps glop tops were used in the early days by Nintendo when the chips were much more expensive, but by the late 90s early 2000s only glop tops I see are in bootlegs. Just my 2 cents


That sounds like it could be true.

I know that Star Fox in particular was super expensive for them to produce at first because of the Super FX chip. Only the early runs of the carts have glop tops, so they probably did that for cost reasons.

Glop tops do have benefits outside of cost though, I believe. Some times they make it possible to arrange them in a way that you save PCB space. Of course, that usually means cost savings, but it could also mean fitting more in the same amount of space. Take the following Konami Famicom carts for example, the two with glop tops fit the same amount of components as the other two but on a smaller PCB.

http://bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/pcb.php? ... +479+39+64

But I'm just speculating about that. The same could be accomplished today without glops but with smaller package ICs, but those might not have been available back then. Or they might have been, but not as readily available. I mean, carts back then had mostly through hole components. These days most things have surface mounted components, and machines that populate all the components onto a PCB. The only recent things I've come across that had glop tops were off brand / cheaply made.
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Re: [help] Castlevania Double Pack GBA Fake?

Post by ExedExes »

BoneSnapDeez wrote:That thing screams fake to me. I've opened 50+ GBA carts and never seen one that looks like that.

Exactly. Looking just at the chips alone is enough for me, but when the label and even the PCB Nintendo stamp are just as you'd find on a real GBA game. I opened up all of mine to clean them and not once did I see a chip layout like that or the Metroid Fusion example.
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Tanooki
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Re: [help] Castlevania Double Pack GBA Fake?

Post by Tanooki »

No doubt that's a fake and it's easy to run down a good size list of problems there between the shell, the label, and the board. The one disturbing part though is that pirates caught on to the quick visual test of having the Nintendo copyright ink you can read next to the pins inside the slot there when it's screwed shut. Pirates used to always lack that as a dead giveaway even if the label was questionable.
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JGBtypeR
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Re: [help] Castlevania Double Pack GBA Fake?

Post by JGBtypeR »

Just to help you 100% confirm.
Here a shot of my cart and it matches Hobie-wan's description of his:
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Beak
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Re: [help] Castlevania Double Pack GBA Fake?

Post by Beak »

Thank you, Racketeers.

I can confirm that there is in fact NO serial number stamped into the label. Checking my 30+ games, it would be the only game without one.

I have made clear to the seller that I just want my refund. If he fights me, I'll elevate it to eBay and make more serious complaints.

Here's his eBay page: http://www.ebay.com/usr/abbaba2012.
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Hobie-wan
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Re: [help] Castlevania Double Pack GBA Fake?

Post by Hobie-wan »

Beak wrote:Here's his eBay page: http://www.ebay.com/usr/abbaba2012.


I see their negative feedback a while back was someone saying their Pokemon cart was bootleg too.
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Re: [help] Castlevania Double Pack GBA Fake?

Post by ejamer »

I've been keen to buy Castlevania Double Pack and FF6 on GBA... but have no confidence when buying online that I'll get something legit, so have accepted it might just never happen. This post only reinforces that resigned feeling.
:(

Sorry this happened to you, but thanks to everyone posting because it's an interesting read.
SpoonyBard
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Re: [help] Castlevania Double Pack GBA Fake?

Post by SpoonyBard »

Always got to be weary of a person that sells so many of the same item like that. That guy sold at least 7 "Castlevania - Double Pack" carts in the exact same condition, all loose and within a month of each other. What are the odds that someone would have that many copies of the same game and nothing else?
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