Multicart - Pirate Multicarts

Pirate Multicarts

Among pirate Famicom games, multicarts often advertise an inflated number of games on their labels (such as "76-in-1," "200-in-1," "1200-in-1," and even "9999999-in-1"), but in reality only have anywhere from five to one hundred truly unique games. The list is padded by different variations of these games, hacked to start at different levels or to start a player with different power-ups. The games are usually first-generation Famicom titles, several of which were never officially released in America, and in typical pirate fashion have either had their names deliberately misspelled, their copyright notices/logos removed, or both.

Other popular video game systems also have their own share of unique pirate multicarts. Unlike the Famicom, the Nintendo Game Boy multicarts have a variety of different, innovative multicart designs. Standard-sized Game Boy multicarts have either a game selection menu like the NES multicarts, or require quick toggling of the Game Boy power switch to select through games. Most of them incorporate an external soft reset button (not available on any original cart), so you can reset the game without powering off the system. To overcome the storage limitations of a standard-sized pirate cart, huge pirate carts were invented. These unusually large and thick carts, more than 2 times the height and depth of a standard Game Boy cartridge, were able to store many of the larger new games, such as Donkey Kong Land easily. One drawback of these carts is they lack any battery backup, so saving games on these carts is impossible. Most of these carts were produced in China, Singapore and Hong Kong.

More recently there have been Game Boy Advance multicarts with several GBA games and several or even hundreds of NES roms. These carts are known to include some bootlegs, hacks or variations of games, advertising them as different games and giving them incorrect box arts on the main boxart.