Bootleg FC carts: Hokuto no Ken & 18-in-1 multicart

[TakuikaNinja]

Yup, I came across 2 more bootleg carts in NZ. They were in a bundle with a legit Yie Ar Kung Fu cart. I'll post about them here in a similar format as before.

Hokuto no Ken: Pretty much this bootleg cart but with no labels on the PCB. The dumped ROM is identical to the legit cart, so it will not be provided.

IMG_20250708_175126.jpg

IMG_20250708_175102.jpg

18-in-1: Same front label and menu/contents as this multicart but the rear label has Engrish remarks and the board uses DIPs instead of epoxy blobs. PCB has markings ET-4302 and J-08-C.

IMG_20250708_175648.jpg

IMG_20250708_175802.jpg

18-in-1_menu.png

krzysiobal's notes seem to indicate a similar "magic address" setup as the Kaiser Exciting Basket bootleg. Is mapper 933 an actual designation? No-Intro lists mapper 255 in the header data for the trusted good dump: https://datomatic.no-intro.org/index.ph ... =45&n=4562
I guess I'll try dumping it with this mapper 255 script first...


And yes, those carts contained the pieces of paper to help hold the PCB in place. In fact, I threw out the thinner pieces which fell out of each one - it was probably covering the gap between the casing and the PCB?

[TakuikaNinja]

Okay, I managed to dump the 18-in-1 cart after modifying the linked mapper 255 script to dump the correct PRG/CHR sizes. (PRG = 256KiB, CHR = 128KiB) It took several tries to match the hash with the known good dump, probably because of dirty/flaky pin connections. No dump will be provided here.

[krzysiobal]

Yeah it is mapper 225 (also duplicate as 255).
It is one of the very first cartridges from my website. At that time when I could not find an existing number from the mapper database I was just assigning my own number (933) in order to test the dumped rom in emulator

My dump's CRC32 is same as from the datomatic website, though there are some very gentle differences between all those PCBs that use mapper 225/255, like:
* different size of PRG/CHR (and so different number of upper PRG/CHR lines latched in registers)
* implementing or not extra data latch (74670) that is used to store number of actually selected game so that after reset, the arrow in menu list points to that game
* your PCB for example takes M2 into account when decoding signals for reading PRG or writing to registers, though it is not needed as /ROMSEL is already low only when M2 is high
* PPU /WE is also wired to 74139 (also not neccessary)

sch2.png

[TakuikaNinja]

That's good to know, thanks.

[TheBoxGamePL]

Please this is dump

[Edited by staff to remove attachment]

[Fiskbit]

We've removed the ROM above. Please avoid posting dumps that neither serve some kind of academic purpose nor aid in preserving rare hardware.