Just found this...what is it?

[fcgamer]

I visited one of my buddies over the weekend, and I bought over $100 worth of games from him.  I've asked him time and time again if he used to have a game store, a rental place, or why he has so many games for sale, but thus far he has been mum.  Last time I asked, he said "I was just cleaning things out after the typhoon" but that still doesn't explain all of the carts I have been purchasing from him, an ecletic mix of mid to late 1980s stuff to later unlicensed / bootleg releases (mid 90s).  This weekend I grabbed this though:







Sadly I forgot to take a pic of the pcb in the case, but I could easily do so on request.

Judging from the cartridge case, this is a bootleg cart...licensed Famicom carts didn't have such a case design.  But why the roms on the ic sockets?  Why the cut out in the unlabeled case for the rom chips?  I almost feel like this was a dev piece by some pirate outfit, while they were experimenting before cranking out a mass production of bootleg carts.  But the thing is, I can't get the damned cart to run!  So I don't know what game is on it...is it an unreleased game, some test / development software, a licensed game that has been hacked...no idea. 

Any other thoughts what this thing might be?
Post Merge: November 22, 2015, 08:30:01 am
Here is a pic of the cart as is:

[chowder]

Wow, nice find!

It does look like some kind of dev cart/prototype to me with the stickers on the chips.  The sockets definitely support that, along with the open case - they could easily reprogram the chips and just put them in through the hole in the case.

Shame it doesn't work, does it just display garbage, or not work at all?  I guess the only way to work out what it is would be to dump the chip contents and see if it matches any known games.

[FrankWDoom]

I would guess pirate dev cart as well. The chips could be dumped directly with an eprom programmer and then constructed into a rom for inspection. Do you have access to one of those?

[MasterDisk]

I think this should be sent to CaH4e3 so he could try to get it dumped

[fcgamer]

I think this should be sent to CaH4e3 so he could try to get it dumped

I am more than interested in getting it dumped, because I am quite curious if anything can be gotten off of the chips and if so, what. 

Does anyone know of some easy ways for dumping games these days?  I don't have an eprom reader or programmer, and even if I did, I would be afraid of damaging the legs on the chip.  But I am also not up to date on the dumping tools, and only remember the notorious CopyNES of yesteryear.  Anything new come out since then I could get?
Post Merge: November 24, 2015, 07:06:35 am
I don't mind sending the cart to someone to get dumped, but I just don't like the chance of it getting lost in the mail and even worse, the wait time if the other party is quite busy or something.

[P]

Well there's Naruko's Kazzo but I don't think it can dump/program EPROM?

Otherwise there's no cheap way around it as far as I know, except sending it to someone with the tools.

[fcgamer]

Well there's Naruko's Kazzo but I don't think it can dump/program EPROM?

Otherwise there's no cheap way around it as far as I know, except sending it to someone with the tools.

So what items can this thing dump then?

[P]

It's used for programming custom cartridges with flash and/or EEPROMs I think. It can dump games too but since your cartridges doesn't work, I doubt it can dump them.

[fcgamer]

It's used for programming custom cartridges with flash and/or EEPROMs I think. It can dump games too but since your cartridges doesn't work, I doubt it can dump them.

I asked for one of these for Christmas from my folks, the price is cheap enough and something like this I've always wanted to have anyways.  If you are right, p, and it can't dump the cartridge then I'll check into sending it out.  I've already had one message about this already. 

[P]

Make sure to get the one with a 60 pin cart connector (or the one with both 72 and 60 pin).

[famifan]

if you have some sort of flash cartridge, then just try to use

http://www.chrismcovell.com/TapeDump_Controls.html

i'm not sure, what kind of mapper it has

[muckyfingers]

The Kazzo is neat piece of hardware, but it is a little tricky to use when dumping NES/Famicom games. I've not been able to get the GUI to work on any of my computers, but the commandline version worked fine. That being said, it can only dump

anrom
cnrom
fme7
mmc1
mmc2
mmc3
mmc4
mmc5
nrom
unrom
vrc4b

if your game is not one of these, it will not be able to read/dump the game.

[MasterDisk]

So it pretty much won't dump any pirates. Sad.

[muckyfingers]

If you know how the mapper works, you can write your own script to dump the game.

[fcgamer]

if you have some sort of flash cartridge, then just try to use

http://www.chrismcovell.com/TapeDump_Controls.html

i'm not sure, what kind of mapper it has

Maybe I can try this method first...but the link is dead for the KCS decoder, and I can't seem to find one.