Buyer Beware... Pirated Gameboy Advance Games on eBay

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A

Allaamu

Member
Apr 15, 2003
185
0
0
I brought Super Street Fighter II for the Gameboy Advance off of some Asian retailer in Alhambra, CA. Needless to say that this item will be returned as the game is a copy... Pirated item. The game freezes when you unlock secrets or is in your system for a little while.

If the cartridge has an odd GAMEBOY Advance logo that doesn't look like the original Nintendo Gameboy Advance logo, then it is a dupe. Return it to the vendor and send eBay a message right away! [[made me plenty mad]]
 
CZroe

CZroe

Lifer
Jun 24, 2001
24,195
857
126
Nearly every import game on eBay is a pirate. Some even have the tri-wing screw but it's still easy to tell.

Watch out because they're everywhere. Heck, I bought a game here in the forums and got a pirated copy!
 
CZroe

CZroe

Lifer
Jun 24, 2001
24,195
857
126
My brother scanned this one... Much better than the Canon Powershot Digital Elph S400 shots below it:
http://webpages.charter.net/ichinisan/images/gba_cart_original_vs_pirated.jpg

http://webpages.charter.net/ichinisan/images/gbapirate1.jpg
http://webpages.charter.net/ichinisan/images/gbapirate2.jpg

The game on the left is the original. Notice it saves to a TSOP FlashRAM chip. The pirated copy saves to battery-backed SRAM. The forum member sold it "As Is" because the the "battery was dead." I thought, "hmm, the game doesn't use a battery so perhaps it'll be an easy fix..." Guess not.

I gave away my other pirated cart. I "imported" Super Mario World: Super Mario Advance 2 from an eBay seller. I thought they couldn't have pirated it so soon because it was the first to use a new 64k FlashRAM save chip. Sure enough, it was pirate copy which was hacked / patched to save on SRAM (You can find the patches online for flash cartridges which only support SRAM saving). The high score save function did not work, but level progression seemed to save normally. I went ahead and bought a legit US copy.
 
CZroe

CZroe

Lifer
Jun 24, 2001
24,195
857
126
My brother scanned 'em :)

The pics and scan do not show that you can see a ridge where the arch on top meets the rest of the cartridge. The official cart has no such ridge.

Also, imported Nintendo-brand game paks still have a plastic-coated paper label while US games have not since 1995 (SNES and Gameboy games abruptly started shipping crappy labels in the US). Pirated copies are nearly always Japanese-style plastic-coated. However, my new U.S. copy of Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3 seems to restore plastic-coated labels in the US market.
 
B

Blackroot

Senior member
Oct 4, 2003
529
0
0
Originally posted by: CZroe
My brother scanned 'em :)

The pics and scan do not show that you can see a ridge where the arch on top meets the rest of the cartridge. The official cart has no such ridge.

Also, imported Nintendo-brand game paks still have a plastic-coated paper label while US games have not since 1995 (SNES and Gameboy games abruptly started shipping crappy labels in the US). Pirated copies are nearly always Japanese-style plastic-coated. However, my new U.S. copy of Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3 seems to restore plastic-coated labels in the US market.
Click to expand...

that don't come out for 5 days, how did you get it, only person i know with it is my friend who works at game stop.
 
T

TerryMathews

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
11,464
2
0
That pirated AW may be a general flashrom cart... You might not want to get rid of it until you know what it is. A flashrom cart of any appreciable size is worth several times the used price of Advanced Wars...
 
CZroe

CZroe

Lifer
Jun 24, 2001
24,195
857
126
Originally posted by: Blackroot
Originally posted by: CZroe
My brother scanned 'em :)

The pics and scan do not show that you can see a ridge where the arch on top meets the rest of the cartridge. The official cart has no such ridge.

Also, imported Nintendo-brand game paks still have a plastic-coated paper label while US games have not since 1995 (SNES and Gameboy games abruptly started shipping crappy labels in the US). Pirated copies are nearly always Japanese-style plastic-coated. However, my new U.S. copy of Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3 seems to restore plastic-coated labels in the US market.
Click to expand...

that don't come out for 5 days, how did you get it, only person i know with it is my friend who works at game stop.
Click to expand...
Got it early with some EXTRA cards (7 total). I didn't keep it a secret: Story and locations posted here.
Originally posted by: mwtgg
Originally posted by: CZroe
My brother scanned this one... Much better than the Canon Powershot Digital Elph S400 shots below it:
http://webpages.charter.net/ichinisan/images/gba_cart_original_vs_pirated.jpg
Click to expand...

Is licensed spelled wrong in the second one? And, that sucks about the faked games.. Hope you get your money back.
Click to expand...
It does look like an "F" instead of an "E." The pic has all the detail the actual cart has (You can see the individual circular ink elements). The guy who owned it before me is the one who got ripped off. I already owned the real thing :) The one from eBay came straight from Hong Kong. Getting him kicked off eBay didn't help because he'll just pop back up under a different name. I reported him anyway and he was gone a couple days later.
Originally posted by: TerryMathews
That pirated AW may be a general flashrom cart... You might not want to get rid of it until you know what it is. A flashrom cart of any appreciable size is worth several times the used price of Advanced Wars...
Click to expand...
Yeah, I know. I used to own a GB eXchanger until a kid got it smashed by a hammer. The flash chip is always highly visible (IE "Intel FLASH! 64Mbit"). I did see reports of pirated original GB carts that used expensive socketed rewritable flash chips (I saw Kirby 2 in particular). I remember the site saying the manufacturer's must have been insane! ;)


By the way, Allaamu, Street Fighter II was recalled because of unreliability (Some said you couldn't even beat it with certain characters). Nintendo swore it wouldn't have passed their quality assurance play testing program if it were in the tested software, but never announced how the production really got screwed up.

Even worse is the ''Akuma bug''. Quite simply, if you manage to make it to Akuma in arcade mode, the screen will glitch out and permanently erase your time attack and survival mode's best times. And it doesn't just erase the times, it prevents you from ever setting a new time. I had to return my copy for a non glitched copy, so watch out!
Click to expand...
 
K

Kenazo

Lifer
Sep 15, 2000
10,429
1
81
crazy. I'm surprised that it can be fiscally worth it to pirate cartridge games. Shows how much I know. So, let's consider an old "Legacy" type system like the Game Gear. Is it possible to get a programmable cartridge that you can just load any rom you want onto?
 
CZroe

CZroe

Lifer
Jun 24, 2001
24,195
857
126
I've seen people on other forums that made their own flashable GameGear cartridges :)

The thing to remember is that the GG is just a portable Master System. Get the Master Gear converter and modify a larger Master System cart.

See the front page of vg-network.com for some news about a new Virtual Boy game with mention of a homebrew flash cart. When the GBA first came out, guides popped up everywhere on how to make your own within weeks.
 
Twista

Twista

Diamond Member
Jun 19, 2003
9,646
1
0
grr im sry! My firewall was blocking them and plus peer guar. "Connection Rejected: 209.225.8.65 - fake files and p2p bots (cable and wireless server)- (10-18-2003 @ 13:02:54)" is what it says grr. Ya the ink looks dull and faded.
 
CZroe

CZroe

Lifer
Jun 24, 2001
24,195
857
126
Originally posted by: Twista
grr im sry! My firewall was blocking them and plus peer guar. "Connection Rejected: 209.225.8.65 - fake files and p2p bots (cable and wireless server)- (10-18-2003 @ 13:02:54)" is what it says grr. Ya the ink looks dull and faded.
Click to expand...

That's why I keep an up-to-date machine without any firewall software for downloads and Internet stuff. It's a pian. BTW, the color-saturated one is the pirate. The faded is the original. My guess is that they couldn't get the gold Nintendo Seal of Quality right so they changed the hue and saturation of the whole thing so it all looks somewhat normal. I don't know why they added the "Licensed by Nintendo" part to a first-party developed game (Intelligent Systems has made the Nintendo Super/Famicom/GB/Advance Wars and Fire Emblem series since the NES days in Japan in addition to Panel De Pon / Tetris Attack, Metroid Fusion, Paper Mario Story, the Super Game Boy, the Wideboy, Wideboy Advance, etc. Just like Nintendo's EAD development team with F-Zero, Mario Kart and the like.

Also, notice the ridge on top is shorter (Ends before the label ends) on the pirated cart and the Gameboy Advance logos are completely different.
 
S

SSP

Lifer
Oct 11, 1999
17,727
0
0
Originally posted by: CZroe
My brother scanned this one... Much better than the Canon Powershot Digital Elph S400 shots below it:
http://webpages.charter.net/ichinisan/images/gba_cart_original_vs_pirated.jpg

http://webpages.charter.net/ichinisan/images/gbapirate1.jpg
http://webpages.charter.net/ichinisan/images/gbapirate2.jpg

The game on the left is the original. Notice it saves to a TSOP FlashRAM chip. The pirated copy saves to battery-backed SRAM. The forum member sold it "As Is" because the the "battery was dead." I thought, "hmm, the game doesn't use a battery so perhaps it'll be an easy fix..." Guess not.

I gave away my other pirated cart. I "imported" Super Mario World: Super Mario Advance 2 from an eBay seller. I thought they couldn't have pirated it so soon because it was the first to use a new 64k FlashRAM save chip. Sure enough, it was pirate copy which was hacked / patched to save on SRAM (You can find the patches online for flash cartridges which only support SRAM saving). The high score save function did not work, but level progression seemed to save normally. I went ahead and bought a legit US copy.
Click to expand...

Hey, dont blame the camera! ;)
 
CZroe

CZroe

Lifer
Jun 24, 2001
24,195
857
126
I do because it was impossible to focus manually (Or to figure out how before giving it back to my friend) and the spiffy focus beam only works with ambient light. Damn automation!

I had a situation trying to snap a shot of my mother's mouth with it for insurance purposes. We went outside, set the settings correctly and spent about an hour before all the shots magically started focusing. I noticed a fingerprint on the lense that may have caused it but regardless without cleaning it the in-focus shots were clear.
 
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