Licensed NES Games not Manufacturered by Nintendo

[ThePhleo | 2,184]

OK, so I’m looking on eBay right now and I can clearly see that there are two major variants of Batman: Return of the Joker.

One made by Nintendo, and one by Sunsoft.

The Sunsoft copies have that shitty “glue mottling” effect (thanks WATA for the terminology) while the Nintendo copies have the classic clean look.

This May lend some hints as to why some Joker boxes have “NES-P48-USA” on the top flaps, while some have “NES-48-USA”...still, all cartridges seem to have P48 on the label.

 

Also, now that I have proof that this a thing that happened once, I need to add something back to my “rare variant Hunt”

I could swear I remember seeing a copy of Roger Clemens MVP Baseball come in a brown cardboard box. I suspect there may be a variant that was made by Nintendo.

This game already has two known cartridge label variants, one with a white block of text and logos on the bottom and one without.

...maybe it’s worth keeping an eye out for ALL of the games on that list I made above. (God help me)

ps:

if anyone has a 3-Screw Stinger I have a bounty of $500 on the cartridge and $1000 for the CIB

[Deadeye | 1,596]

16 minutes ago, ThePhleo said:

OK, so I’m looking on eBay right now and I can clearly see that there are two major variants of Batman: Return of the Joker.

One made by Nintendo, and one by Sunsoft.

The Sunsoft copies have that shitty “glue mottling” effect (thanks WATA for the terminology) while the Nintendo copies have the classic clean look.

That's makes a lot of sense now.  I recently picked up Batman ROTJ, and I was wondering why so many labels looked terrible.  I waited to find a clean copy and looking at the back of the shell now, manufactured by Nintendo.

[DoctorEncore | 3,691]

2 hours ago, LeatherRebel5150 said:

 

So I'm going to take a stab at what went down in this situation then. When Nintendo started letting companies provide their own chips during the shortage, Konami found a supplies of chips that would work but had a different pinout. Unlike Acclaim or Sunsoft, for some reason Konami didn't have the ability/talent/access to manufacturing of the boards and asked Nintendo to make a tweaked design for them which resulted in the new  design. That's my plausible explanation

This seems plausible considering Konami's impressive output during the NES era. They would have been one of the few companies worth making exceptions for.

[austin532 | 467]

There is also a Bigfoot white cardboard box variant. I never see it but I did have one.

[Koopa64 | 51]

This is the game Jack Nicklaus Golf. The board says both Nintendo and Konami, I don’t see it written with UNROM anywhere, Konami usually labeled their boards differently.

Notice the PRG ROM chip, it only says Konami, not Nintendo. The parts number is exactly like the numbers Konami uses on their self-manufactured Famicom carts. 

someone above speculated Konami recycled Famicom rom chips for nes games and got Nintendo’s permission to make their own NES boards. That’s possible, but there are lots of Konami games that would have needed translation and localization, they also made quite a few NES-only games, along with Famicom-only games. Their Famicom boards do accept EPROM compatible chips, but I don’t remember ever seeing a Konami made NES game that wasn’t the UNROM-type mapper. Those always used cheaper 28pin 128KB nonstandard roms.