[Dacicus]

Hello. I've been to this site quite a few times and found the articles very interesting. I just checked out the forum yesterday, though, and I found it even more interesting*.

My story: On my first visit back to Romania (I'm Romanian by birth, but live in the US) in 1998, I got a videogame system (it says Sega Mega Drive 2 on the package) and two games that I brought back to the US for some weird reason. Well, I suppose that I thought I could somehow get it to work over here (feel free to laugh at my n00bishness, but please also try to respond with something helpful).

Anyway, the things that interest me are the games, which I dug last month. I'm pretty sure that at least one of them is a pirate cartridge. It says several things (in order from top to bottom: 95 in 1, VT-653, 1998, Super) and has some pictures of games/game symbols that aren't actually on it, iirc (Adventure Island IV and 3 Contra Force(?) on either side of the text; bottom row, left to right: a picture of a hockey goalkeeper diving, cartoon of a guy shooting a gun with a dog nearby, Mortal Kombat symbol, some cartoon picture with Japanese(?) text and the number 5).

The second game is the one that interests me the most. The cartridge says NT-621 and Street Fighter on it, with several other pieces of Japanese(?) text, two of which are preceded by the numbers 96 and 60. On the left side, there is a mosaic-type picture of Chun Li, Blanka, E. Honda, Ken, Sagat, Guile, Zangief, and Ryu. That's their approximate order from bottom to top. From what I remember, this game isn't exactly a normal version of Street Fighter II, if it could even be called that. I only remember playing it on an old--possibly B&W--TV in Romania, but the character select screen was definitely different from the real SFII game. There was a pretty large, rectangular grid of characters. It may have been 8-by-8 or even larger, but it wasn't necessarily square. In any case, I seem to remember that the character face sprites repeated every line or every few lines. Furthermore, I think that the sprite didn't necessarily match up to which character you actually got when the fighting started.

I've done some research into pirate NES carts online, and the closest picture I've seen to the character select screen as I remember it was the one from Mari Street Fighter III Turbo on this page. This probably has the same or similar number of mostly-repeated choices as the game I have, but I'm sure that Mario was not in it. Furthermore, I don't think that there were any alterations on the pictures; they just repeated after a while.

Basically, I'd like to know if anyone can help me identify these games. I can't exactly play them to get any more info. I've tried, but the screen does some weird thing in which it keeps scrolling up or down over and over again. The cartridges themselves are yellow and too large (or maybe too small) in width to fit in my normal NES. I'd post pictures, but I'm at college until December.

Thanks for your patience in reading this, and thanks for any help.

*Don't take this the wrong way. The articles are great. There's just a greater variety of info on the forum, afaict.

[Richter Belmont]

Hi Dacicus. It sounds as though your pirate system is Famicom-based hardware (the Japanese equivalent of NES), but formatted for PAL TV standards.

The United States uses the NTSC standard for television signals, so you would need a PAL to NTSC converter for it to properly display.

I'm not certain what pirates those are... they might not even be dumped yet... but they seem rather interesting. Sounds similar to a pirate system my friend has. Perhaps one of the other forumgoers will be familiar with it.