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I only find it tough when Bald Bull charges from a longer distance.

I remember purposely dying at the Great Palace just so I could start with all my lives there. Not sure if I remember that boss being dead once I beat it. But then again, it wasn't a hard game at that point.

Is it harder on the FDS?

I beat Zelda 2 FDS today!

I grinded myself to 6 lives then set out for the grand palace, lost half those lives on the way, got to the firebird and beat him on my last life with little health left, then died at Dark Link with him having ONE piece of health left(and YES you better believe I did the "crouch and stab" thing) Then as I continued I saw that some of the items like the extra life was gone and I thought I would have to reset to truly try again but as I got to the firebird again he wasn't there, so I got to try Dark Link again with full health and then I could beat it pretty easily(although he does jump on you even in the corner).

He's tough and fast, but he also gives some opportunities for getting stars. He is unique in that he can't be knocked down by depleting his stamina with normal punches. The most important thing to master is his bull charge which means life or death.

 
 
 
 
That's correct - don't rush to believe any speculation that carts with switches on are debug / dev / test / or sample carts - generally they are just pirate / bootleg releases.

Still fun to come across and collect for - but not the rare development items they can sometimes be pitched as, in an effort to command a higher price.  A picture would help to clarify.

Nintendo did use dipswitches in later systems like GB, GBA, DS, but I have never seen an official Famicom version of this - because manufacturers generally made their own boards and shells.

I just recently went back and put some time into Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, I'm stuck at Bald Bull #2. Gotta get his timing down.

It seems I just recently bought one from you on eBay without even realizing it was you. Stoked to get it and try it out, thank you!

Sounds more like those programmable NROM cartridges used by a pirate device. The switch is probably for setting the mirroring (AKA scroll) setting, which depends on what game is programmed to it.

I happened across several cartridges from Japan with a black switch protruding from the front of the case. Each has a crude,  circular label with a single digit number on them, black case and contain a game. Were these used for development or competition? The little I can find online so far indicates they could be prototype cartridges. Thanks in advance

As I understand, disk writers can be off causing disks written at a disk writer kiosk to be problematic. Various reasons have been given such as disk writer speed or head alignment. This assumes that the disk you received was written at a disk writer kiosk...I cannot remember if this title was ever offered at a disk writer kiosk though.

In my experience, if other disks read and one does not it is likely a head adjustment issue. I'm not advocating for you to adjust the head of your unit, unless you are 100% confident with the process...I've been down a few rabbit holes with head adjustment in the past. It can be a thing of nightmares!! But in my experience this resolves the issue 99% of the time.

Or a disk re-re-write could be in order to get the disk written properly. Both this, and fine tuning head adjustment generally has resolved Error 27's for me in the past. I would not recommend you clean the physical disk itself.

There is a chance it is a bad disk, but over the years I've run into maybe 8 or 9 totally unrecoverable disks.