There are fake N64 games circulating everywhere...and the fakes are getting better! 

That is true, a lot of people don't care if they are getting a real one or a fake one, as long as they can play the game. There is a quality issue with fakes, but in some cases $5 is a better bargain than $500. Back around six years ago, I remember the main fake I'd see was Earthbound. The sad thing is some of the back labels for Earthbound fakes look better than the real ones! lol

@@gumptendo Personally as long as a reproduction copy is like, borderline identical (and works) and the seller is upfront about it being a repro, I'm perfectly fine with buying one. Though of course I'd rather buy a real copy, some games have super expensive real copies so it's a hard ask to buy some games.

If I just wanted to play the game on real Hardware I don't care if it's a repro as well, esp for rare games. The problem lies, when they misrepresent them as real and try to scam someone for top dollar.

I have a Everdrive 64 which makes the original carts almost worthless.

@@brandonwombacher2559 that's great for playing them but there's a bit of nostalgia of owning the original carts. At least for me the franchises that I grew up with. In recent years I have been able to buy quite a few of them cause of my trips to Japan. Although they are in Japanese, you can't get the same kind of deals in the States that you can there for this stuff.

Everdrive is a cool device. I don't own one, but I've looked into them for research value. The fakes I've spent money on (that weren't donated/borrowed), were purchased specifically to make videos to warn people about them. The GB, GBC, and GBA fakes are about $4 each, but then you have the issues of their poor quality. I know people like buying the fakes because they're cheap, but looking into your advice would probably be better for their wallets in the long run.

​@@gumptendo I tried a fake Pokemon Emerald just to see if I could trade to to Leaf Green or to transfer forward... Unfortunately learned that I couldn't do either of those things.

Genuine question, why do you believe it's better to give your money to the people who make every drive over the people who make repros? Neither of them own the intellectual property. Most Repros are sold as Repros.

It sucks that everdrives are so expensive, and I really dont get why. They cant be that much more to produce than a repro is

i do not care for flashcarts at all

That does seem to be a common concern I've seen. I honestly don't think the counterfeiters are going to go through the efforts because it would cost money for them to change their ways, and as it is people are currently buying their products. If people stop buying their stuff, then they may change.

That same person sells The Missing Link, in addition to fake OOT, Mario Party, and others. Guessing in his scamminess, he made a mistake lol

Sorry to hear your collection was stolen, but it's good you're able to get replacements to play for cheap.

Putting an R or similar on the label could be a good.idea so they don't eventually enter the secondary market.

Is there any significant difference that you can tell between the real games and repros? I had bought a first gen Zelda game that was known to be glitchy and it was. Then I bought a repro without knowing and it worked and looked how the real one should. I think I might start getting them if there’s no difference in gameplay.

There we have it folks. Simple logic is always the best. I fully agree.

That's excellent advice for people with eBay shopping. I know eBay has its protections in place, but definitely buying things from reputable sellers is a great idea!

I haven't thought about that. I've had to change so many capacitors on SNES, Genesis, and N64 games I've gotten from lots that this observation is awesome! Good catch!

Early surface mount was most notably used by NASA for soldering chips in the Apollo Guidance Computer in ~1969.

@@elektrokinesis4150 thats cool to know! It took quite a while before they became common in consumer electronics. =]

I understand this could be sort of a double-edged sword, but I don't know if we have to worry too much. The counterfeiters haven't cared about quality up to this point, so there's a good chance they probably won't in the future, either.

@@gumptendo jup if they upgrade to embossed numbers it will get real hard.

Probably will have to open them up to look at the pcbs, especially anything pricey

I don't think they'll put more money into manufacturing to make them resemble the original. They'll always go for cheaper materials to maximize profits.

There will always be a way to tell legitimacy or not. If you know your stuff identifying fakes is super easy.

There was a later release of Majora's Mask that had the gold cartridge (no glitter still) without the lenticular sticker. First time I saw a Pokemon Stadium 2 cart, I thought it was fake since it was dual-tone! lol

@@gumptendo I remember getting Stadium 2 as a kid but being upset because it didn't come with the gameboy attachment

I have pretty sure real MM and Pokemon stadium 1 & 2. Bought like mid/late 2000s after moving and wanting to play n64 games. Currently waiting for cheap RGB chip from aliexpress to mod my n64.

the holographic image-changing label was only on the first printing/pre-order cartridges. Later editions had a regular label.

Yeah, I'd hope most people selling would understand someone buying it wants to see the board. FunnyPlaying makes good quality blank ROM carts, but there's a premium for them. I'm guessing with these ones, it's more of cost savings to mass produce the garbage looking ROM boards of poor quality just to make a few bucks quickly.

Great advice! Some of the NES fakes are starting to add the F and B with numbers on the front and back shell parts, but haven't seen that yet on SNES or N64.

Thanks! And yes, things like worn labels and dirty pins would make sense to be legit, but some of these fakes have been around awhile or are purposefully made to mislead. Scary what people go through to try to scam someone these days.

That's true most of the time. I have seen games like Resident Evil 2 and Ogre Battle 64 with the lighter colored boards, but haven't seen a fake yet that is the dark brown color. Best way is just to pop the game apart and take a look inside.

@@gumptendo Those are the only 2 exceptions. For all other titles it holds up. I agree that taking apart is best, but checking the cartridge strip is arguably the best of quick methods.

Sorry to hear you unknowingly got a fake. As long as you've played it and have had fun playing it, that would be the bright side of the situation at least!

@@gumptendo Absolutely! 100% completed the game on that cartridge, I have nothing to complain about. But thanks again for the video, so now I know to mark the cartridge as a repro in my collection! And also for giving me some great tips for scrutinizing the rest of my purchases.

That is true, but most of the counterfeiters don't care enough about quality to change how they're doing it. I'm sure they will get better at faking them over time, like with Diddy Kong Racing, but still won't match the quality that Nintendo produced decades ago.

@@gumptendo Loose carts and opened games are one thing, it used to be so obvious that even my parents would know what to avoid, but we can see how much it’s come along in the past few decades. Where all this becomes extremely dodgy is with sealed games, as long as you have a decent quality scan and print of a box, along with a decent repro of red strip sealing plastic, you effectively have a perfect fake as no one is ever going to break that red strip seal to check the contents. Even if any of the grading companies did any due diligence and x-rayed a sealed game (which I highly doubt they do) you could easily get round any conflicts by using identical PCBs from cheaper games, possibly from another region. If they did any extra due diligence (which I doubt even more) they’d know the exact weight each sealed game and each revision should weigh, but even then you could simply use paper to attain the correct weight. The entire sealed game market is one YT video away from total collapse. Trust me on this one, the numbers simply don’t add up, there’s too many sealed games out there for the market to be 100% legit, no one back in the day was dropping £50/$60 on a game just to keep it sealed on a shelf somewhere.

That's pretty cool, I did not know that's what those numbers meant. Thanks for the info!

I know exactly what you mean. One gaming store near us bases all of their prices first on GameStop, then on eBay if GameStop doesn't have a price for it. We don't buy anything from that shop lol We see a lot of people basing everything on Price Charting, too. While Price Charting is good about most stuff, N64 prices have dropped over the past year on there because it doesn't filter out fakes that were sold on eBay in its algorithms (which would be tough to do so I don't blame them). Also, we've seen individual items under "loose" list sales that included that item in a lot and broken or untested consoles sold "as-is" included in "loose" with consoles that are complete and working.

​@@gumptendoI'm a reseller, and I typically charge 25 percent less than the local retro game store. For example if a game is 100 dollars at the retro games store, I charge 75 dollars, not only are you saving 25 dollars, but also the taxes.

They're just ROMs saved to flash storage. Kind of like the concept of saving and running a game from an SD card.

Good catch! I'll have to remember to check that.

Same with the german text, they alway lack the umlaut.

I'm glad you found this helpful! Sorry to hear you were scammed, but good you got it resolved.

All excellent advice! Sad thing is, I've had a couple cartridges where I clean them really well and they still don't work, so a last moment "joke" I just blow in the cartridge and try again, then they work. I usually clean them afterwards to get all the saliva and junk from mouth air out.

I've seen lots of fakes on FB, but haven't bought any fakes from there yet. I usually just stick to buying video game lots people are selling, so if I end up getting a fake it's because it was in someone's collection. I bought a bag of a bunch of loose Personal Trainer Walking at a garage sale for $3. There were at least 50 of that same game in the bag. I got it in hopes they were fake so I could use them to compare against real ones, but they all ended up being real, sadly!

people say the same things about sneakers lol

Someone can switch the board into another shell. so you got the real cartridge with a fake board inside

That and the font. The font on fakes always looks.. off..

Thanks for the info. I need to learn more about chips and stuff about the boards. Any suggestions on resources to start?

The print on the chip on the counterfeit cartridge says "Altera" if i read it right, So I assumed it's FPGA, google Intel Altera. they are one of the main players in this field besides Xilinx.

If you're buying on eBay, make sure it's from people with a high amount of good ratings and a return policy. Also, screenshot the description before putting in an offer. The Diddy Kong Racing cart was from eBay. One of my friends got it. It was being sold as the real thing. He was luckily able to get a refund. As far as SNES, there are fakes, but from what I've seen it's mostly with the big titles like Earthbound, Chrono Trigger, EVO, Link to the Past, etc. I'll try to acquire some of the fakes to make a video for SNES games, but mainly look for that number stamp on the back label and Nintendo on the main board.

Yeah, most of these games use flash memory for saving, so you don't need a battery.

Thanks! Glad it was helpful.

Yeah, it's sad finding so many fakes when you're trying to find real ones. I know some people don't care, but people should be marking their copies as fake and selling them for fake prices lol

That is true about some wear, but the Mario Kart example, the person who sold it purposefully made it look like it was in rough shape. I've seen a few other ones on FB Market that are obvious Pokemon fakes with ripped up labels and tri-wing screws on the backs.

You're welcome, glad it was helpful! And yes, the issue with a lot of these counterfeiters is they are lazy and cheap. They cut corners and it shows in the lack of quality.

The only significance is nostalgia man. No big deal.

@@reitairue2073 not really, my 64 collection is worth $$$$$$

That is true. I cover it a bit more in the Pokemon videos that I try not to rely on labels. I've had to replace labels before, plus some games have multiple variations of labels. If anyone needs to compare labels, I'd recommend using images for the game on Price Charting.

@@gumptendo good point... odd tale is I got a game that was fake. Had all the marking of an N64 cartridge being fake. It felt new, the Nintendo logo on the back was off and the like. The game works but I could tell

I'm right there with you!

I pulled mine out and looked at it, the picture he showed looks like it might be a bit too glittery but the Majora's Mask cart is textured, if you got a light shining down on, possibly not a fake.

I read this comment before watching the video and was worried Mischief Makers repros were finally surfacing.

I just added some images of real vs the fake MM cartridges to the community tab. The glitter effect was not there on real versions of MM.

Thanks for the kind words! It sounds like your Pokemon Gold needs a battery replacement. The type of battery is a CR2025 and it will require soldering. If you don't have the equipment to do that, some retro stores charge around $10-20 to change the battery for you. May just need to call around to local stores around you if that's the route you need to take.

@gumptendo Thank You ! You just made my day.

I've also seen major misspellings on the boards of fake games. Some are pretty funny how bad the spelling can be for even "Nintendo".

You're welcome, glad this was helpful to you. I have a feeling other retro game channels don't want to deal with the trolls and down votes. I see all trolling and down votes as activity on my videos that makes them more noticed! lol

That's awesome you still have the boxes and everything! I was a big dumb-dumb and in school for a presentation, I cut up the box for Final Fantasy 3 to glue it onto paper to present. Great rule to have when purchasing games.

Thanks for the info! I have a few of the Wisdom Tree games for NES that were some of the first "hacks" for that console to bypass the lock out chips. Fun stuff!

Thanks! I hate seeing people get scammed. My friend who got that Diddy Kong Racing was pretty defeated after receiving it, so decided to turn his misfortune into something to help people.

Good catch! The Diddy Kong Racing fakers definitely did a better job at some things, but even that one doesn't quite look right at the Nintendo logo.

Looks like No Mercy with the USA-1 is under $300 now. Not saying that's good, just wish there was better news. Allegedly, there's a way you can clear the game's memory to fix that glitch. Looks like you hold down Start when you start the system with the game in there, then a menu comes up with an option to erase the save data from the cartridge. You erase the save data and that's supposed to fix it. Not sure if it works, I don't have the game to test that out.

What am I missing? There are dozens of copies of No Mercy on eBay for like $30, from reputable sellers.

My bad... I assume you're saying there happens to be a specific revision of No Mercy that doesn't have the save issue, and copies of THAT are expensive.

Correct, there was a revision that fixed the save issue, but you had to go through the company to get it, so it's rare.

Exactly, can't trust anyone these days! At least the original ones will probably have crusty old orange/brown glue where the label rips off instead of being clean looking.

I'm guessing that since people still knowingly buy the poor quality ones, they aren't going to spend the money to improve quality.

@@gumptendo You have a point.

Sounds like you had a pretty awesome win there!

Definitely great advice! Like you mention, sellers can benefit by being open about what they're selling.

Yeah, that's my assumption to it, too. Most of the old games I've seen with damaged stickers actually have spots of yellowed glue where the sticker used to be, these fakes with damaged labels don't have the old, crusty glue.

Totally agree! The counterfeiters would probably be better off just putting "reproduction" on the label and selling as that instead of trying to make them to fool collectors. More people would go to the source for saving money and knowing what they're buying.

That's some nice info, thanks! I never even thought about them having to emulate some of the protection functionality for the system.

Most games you won't really have a difference while playing. I'm finding that out with the Pokemon ones on Gameboy as I've been testing things for shorts.

I have a fake pokemon red, and i cant use the pokemon storage system without the game crashing. Had to play the whole game with the same 6 pokemon lol. Sometimes they will have weird glitches like that @@gumptendo

That was a great time for buying retro. It was before values started to jump up. In 2020, people needed hobbies and were given checks, so values of collectibles like retro games and Pokemon cards jumped up. We get a lot of our retro games from local retro gaming stores. I don't trust online sales as much for consoles other than 3DS and Virtualboy. Last I read, neither of those are getting hit by fakes like everything else is.

That's a good question. It may depend on the game. In the GBA games, for example, FF4 fake has a battery, but the real one doesn't. In that case, the fake may weigh more than the real one...then again, the plastic is thinner. I'll look into this.

Thanks for the info! There are a few other great ways people have mentioned in the comments, too. Might almost be worth making a sequel video of this one to cover lots of the ways that were missed.

You're welcome! What's your favorite N64 game?

@@gumptendoSin and Punishment

Sorry to hear you got scammed. Were you able to get a copy that worked on your PS2?

How is Mother 3? I'm so surprised Nintendo still has not released it. They just need to have the company that remade Mario RPG remake the Mother trilogy for Switch.

It's not worth the effort given that there's a good number of people who'll buy it anyways. Peruse the comments here for examples.

@@NinjaRunningWild That makes a lot of sense.

Technology for video games advanced pretty quickly. With N64 and GBA, they started using flash storage for saves. It's nice having one less component that can go bad.

@@gumptendo I guess the Game Boy and Game Boy Color was declared incompatible with such solutions... imagine if the Pokémon games used flash storage? People might have been able to play their games for longer without losing saves.

It was cheaper to use batteries. Flash and other solutions weren’t really cost effective till around the time gba came out. flash was a lot cheaper

Some earlier GBA games even used battery-backed storage. Advance Wars 1 comes to mind.

It depends on how much data you wanted to store - at the time the N64 came out you could get cheap EEPROMs, but they were very small (2kbit/256 byte), and were typically used for things like storing tuning presets in TVs. That's why games that had larger storage requirements used the controller pak (which was battery backed SRAM). Some later games (like Zelda OOT) had larger storage requirements and would have taken up a whole controller pak, so a new cart type with battery backed SRAM inside was developed. Some later games used FeRAM - this was a technology that had been around for a long time, but had finally reached the point where it became cost competitive with battery backed SRAM - this was used in games like Zelda: MM, Paper Mario and Pokemon Stadium. It also had one significant disadvantage, which was that inside the chip the readout process erases the data - this is normally transparent to the user because the chip has internal logic to write the data back immediately afterwards, but if the power fails during a read cycle it can corrupt your save.

That's true. None of the fake chips have any pins or solder points sticking through to the backs.

I'm waiting on it to arrive, but I purchased a new version of a fake Pokemon game I found on AliExpress. Going to make a video because most of the ways to tell it's a fake don't exist on this one... Only issue is instead of $4 it's $40, but I'm sure over time it'll be cheaper for them to make. I do like hearing stories about how people got their cartridges, but for some reason in our area, 99% of people who are selling video games are resellers and they don't care about the stories and nostalgia, just the money (and want 100% Price Charting or above) and they won't even budge a few percent on the price. We are sometimes lucky enough to find regular people selling their stuff, though. Some of these people I've talked to for hours when I pick up their games and consoles.