Super Mario Bros / Duck Hunt PCB Images

[pcmantinker]

The other day I was cleaning all of my NES games and came across this while cleaning my Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt cart:

Front side of PCB

Back side of PCB

Is this common for NES games? Every single other game that I have uses the DIP packages. At first I thought this was a Chinese pirate repro cart, but then I saw the 1985 Nintendo copyright in very small text on the back.

[3gengames]

It's fine, don't worry.

[pcmantinker]

I'm not worried about the cart. I was just curious about whether it was common.

[lidnariq]

Anything mass produced was made in epoxy—it let Nintendo save something like 1 or 2¢ per cartridge, which when you're making hundreds of thousands to millions (as the pack-ins were) becomes a lot of money:
http://bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/search.p ... kage=EPOXY

In Japan and for pirates, the economies of scale were slightly more in favor of epoxy packaging, so a lot more were:
http://bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/search.php?package=EPOXY

[tokumaru]

Is this common for NES games?

It's common for SMB/DH carts. I have never seen one that didn't use epoxy blobs.

[TmEE]

I just looked into my USA SMB+DH hoping to see blobs... I got the usual DIP chips.

[rainwarrior]

Why would you hope for blobs?

(My SMB-DH is blobs. So is my Gyromite.)

[TmEE]

Majority of my pirate carts are blob based but none of my official ones are, it would be a nice change

[Ziggy587]

I was really upset when I got my FC Contra cart, I was planning on putting the English fan translation on the cart but found the blobs when I opened it up. I guess technically, it would have still been possible to do it, but I would have had to solder most connections to the cart edge and cut traces. Eff that.

[mikejmoffitt]

I too was upset when I saw my Rolling Thunder Famicom cartridge had blobs and I couldn't socket it for Famitracker Namco163 playback.

The Game Boy DMG-CPU-08 revision of the motherboard has the major ICs as epoxy blobs as well.

[lidnariq]

This only makes it minimally less awful, but: you can remove the epoxy blob ROMs and so only have to worry about connecting wires, not also cutting everything. (Under the epoxy blob there's no resist)

[rainwarrior]

I haven't seen any N163 carts that aren't glob tops.