Thank you to ROMLaboratory for posting such excellent info on the pinouts, it allowed me to compare it to the Mother 2 cart and see how a single ROM cart should be wired up to the MAD-1 Decoder and see what else might be different.

Leg 35 is currently connected to Ground, instead, this should to go to Cartridge Edge Connector 48 which is A22, the 29F032B doesn’t use A22 though, so we can ignore this one.

Leg 33 is currently connected to MAD-1 Leg 16, needs to be connected to MAD-1 Leg 4 instead (orange wire).

Leg 2 is currently connected to Ground, instead this needs to go to Cart Edge Connector 46, which is also linked to MAD-1 Decoder Leg 13 (purple wire).

Once you’ve got your 29F032B flashed with the American Earthbound ROM (needs to be headerless so that’s 3,145,728 bytes), and you’ve removed the first MASKROM you have a couple alterations to make, these are the differences I found… You can leave the second MASKROM on there, as we’re wiring up the cart so that’s configured for just the first MASKROM/EEPROM. Because of this, they are wired up slightly differently, meaning a couple of modifications are required if you want to replace just one of the chips on the Mother 2 cart.

If you’ve stumbled upon this page because you’re looking for info on fake Earthbound carts, please take time to look at Earthbound Central, in fact, you should be looking at the main site anyway! They also have a copy of the Earthbound Players Guide in PDF format.Īn example of an Earthbound cart at the bottom, a Mother 2 cart at the top An example of a Fake Earthbound Cart boardĪnyway, an original American SNES Earthbound cartridge has just one MASKROM chip, the Japanese Mother 2 cart has 2 MASKROMs. Obviously I hope no-one uses this info to start doing the same thing, converting the original Japanese Mother 2 cart is more involved than making a fake, and of course the cart is left looking like the Japanese cart still.

The people making and passing off fakes for the real thing are doing this by purchasing various American SNES donor carts and converting them to Earthbound with a flash EEPROM and then applying a fake label. Earthbound isn’t a particularly rare cart, but it does sell for a lot of money. I guess I might be criticised for passing on information on how to make a fake Earthbound cart. Since I started messing with SNES cart modifications I couldn’t resist this project, I wanted to convert a Japanese Super Famicom Mother 2 cart into an English Earthbound game.

Download authentic earthbound cartridge