Pirate Game Boy Advance carts?

I love the Nintendo DS Lite for its form factor and it’s versatility. It plays DS games and GBA games and with an R4 or M3 card it can even run emulators for NES or GB/GBC.
I didn’t have any GBA games I could play so I wanted to get some. Actually I do have a few Japanese titles but they’re in… Japanese. As a kid I loved The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past, it was unprecedented at the time. A vast world to explore, a great storyline, beautiful graphics and a return to form like the original The Legend Of Zelda. This version is a remake, but it looks very good and stays true to the original. At a local flea market (IJ-hallen) I recently found a copy of The Minish Cap but the seller asked 20 euro for it. I took a closer look and noticed that the Nintendo© logo on the back of the cartridge was in a strange font, not very Nintendo like. I told the seller “… but it’s not an original”, he said he knew and he still wanted 20 euro. Needless to say I passed on the deal.

I found a Chinese seller selling some of the more popular GBA games, including A Link To The Past and Super Mario Advance 4, which is actually Super Mario Bros. 3 with an extra Mario Bros. game. The games only came in a case, but no manual or anything else. They looked really good, authentic even. The strange thing was that you could specify if you wanted an EU or a USA label on your cart and you could order as many as you liked. They were going for about 6 euro each so while it smelled like piracy I decided to give it a try.

A few weeks later my games arrived and I tried them out. They work fine, including saving, altough Super Mario Advance 4 has an error before the game begins, complaining about “Saved data is corrupted”. I played through most of the game in various sessions and my progress is saved, so I’m not exactly sure what’s going on here.

And then it works fine…

I must admit, to the trained eye, it’s easy to see that these cartridges are knock-offs: The corners of the labels are much rounder than originals, the Nintendo logo is a bit dodgy and the plastic is much softer/bendy than original cartridges. However, if you’re not aware that pirate cartridges exist it’s very easy to take these cartridges for the real thing! The backs look legit. The bottom one is an official cartridge.

For comparison, I also opened an original copy of “Bakuten Shoot Beyblade”.

Wow, it looks really interesting! The strange Nintendo logo on the PCB, the “AGB-E05-01” marking, the silver cartridge connector pins, the partially scraped off stickers on the chips… have they been salvaged from other electronics and been repurposed? There are actually people recreating cartridges of 12 year old games. Just wow, really fascinating. Obviously these cartridges don’t have the same collectible value as originals, but then again, these are a lot cheaper: an original Link To The Past for GBA fetches between 25 and 70 euro, depending on its state.