Something special or garbage?

[fcgamer]

I've had this for about two or three years, generally I've put this on the garbage side of things, trying to half-heartedly sell it here and there. What is it, well a labeless version of Spelunker on Famicom, lol. Check out the pics please:



The stickers on the back were added by me, and the black thing is covering a shop label, no need to give away my sources, sorry

Tonight I was about ready to chuck this into a set of stuff that I'm trying to move, and something dawned on me, Spelunker was only a led game, right? And this one has no led.

Later I decided to look it up on bootgod, totally different PCB/chips being shown for Spelunker.

http://bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/profile.php?id=2258

As can be seen from my pics though, it definitely seems to be a legit irem PCB ...

Thoughts on what exactly this is? Something special, or just garbage?

Let's discuss.

[gorgyrip]

It's legit:
http://bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/pcb.php?PcbID=548
You should dump it and see if there are any differences.

Edit: the one you linked uses rom for chr and prg, while your cart uses chr ram, so definitely there's a difference. Maybe a proto?

[ID415]

No Famicom game will ever be garbage. Good luck with the pursuit.

[senseiman]

Spelunker wasn't only an LED game, they released two versions of it, one with LED and one without.  The ones without LEDs are a lot rarer.  Basically late in the game's release they realized the kids weren't that into the LEDs and they made production of the cards expensive so they ditched them.

I did a post about them a few years ago on my blog, they did the same with Sqoon, 10 Yard Fight and Zippy Race:

https://famicomblog.blogspot.com/2013/11/my-new-sqoon-missing-those-lovely-irem.html