Pirates that work better on clones?

[Bramsworth]

Is it true that there are some pirate games that work better on pirated hardware more so than on official? For example, if the game has all garbled graphics. I think I read somewhere here that a lot of pirate games are usually tested on cheap clones when they're being made by the developers, or it's assumed that's the case. Anybody gone through this with anything or have any examples? ATM from what I'm being told by someone who just received a package, that Doraemon hack of Somari seems like it could be one of those games :/

[JC]

I don't think that's really true. What you often find is that more recent pirates -- the globtops -- are so poorly manufactured that the pins on the board don't line up with the Famicom's contacts. In some very specific cases, like pack-in games for Famiclones, I can see how they might have manufactured the game to work on the clone itself.

[ericj]

I have 2 games that absolutely will not play on real hardware, and it isn't because the pins don't align. One of them is a Gimmick (Pipe V) pirate and the other one is a Pokemon 4 in 1. They play perfectly on clone hardware every time, but not at all on the real hardware. I even tried them with adapters thinking maybe it was the pin alignment--no luck.

[nintendodork]

My Pokemon Crystal RPG is also like that.  It also leads me to assume that all the games from Trenton_net are like that.

[JC]

They shouldn't be. I've got a ton of Waixing and Nanjing RPGs and all of them work on my Famicom without a problem.

[133MHz]

Some games doesn't have mapper informations in the cart but in the system.

What?

[UglyJoe]

I think he means that a Famiclone may include a MMC in the console itself.  That way, they can manufacture games that use that MMC without having to include it on all their carts (kinda like the Datach unit and its tiny carts and, to some extent, how the FDS ram adapter works).

[Bramsworth]

No way to tell for sure unless you can test the cart on a couple different clone systems I guess. This sucks. If I have it sent back to me and refund the guy I'm not sure what I'll do with the cart, since anyone else I send it to will likely have the same issues.

[Trenton_net]

In general I've found that some games work fine on real systems while others only work well on Famiclones. Perhaps is because the developers debug on Famiclones for which they make the software for? Beats me! No idea what causes this incompatibility, but it does seem to exist for some titles.

As an example that was mentioned, Pokemon Crystal works fine on my Famiclone, but is a bitch to get running on legit machines.

[Bramsworth]

For some reason the titlescreens of some pirates would refuse to display properly on my legit NES, while the rest of the game works fine. I don't see how they can be so picky about such things, you'd think it's just the same hardware after all :/

[Trenton_net]

Real hardware and clone hardware in theory should be identical, considering that's what a "Clone" should be: A perfect copy. However, this is far from the case. Many legit games don't work correctly on Famiclones. It's not so hard to see why it would work the other way, with Pirates not working on real consoles.

[shoggoth80]

I have a Penguin console clone (very compact, kinda neat, I do most of my famicom gaming on that thing), and it came with a 111-in-1 cart that is pretty dimunitive, and I can't get it to work on real hardware. Most everything else I have tried works fine though.