Spotting fakes (DS related)

[importaku]

Seeing as DS fakes are so prolific out there and prices on games are climbing all the time this new bit of info is pretty handy when weeding out those fakes as they are getting better and better with making them look legit. The first 2 methods i had were....

Making sure the dot printed ink serial number on the back matches the serial on the manual and box cover, booting the suspicious game on a DSi or a 3DS will usually without fail trigger an error screen when you try to boot as fake carts are not made in the same way as originals and nintendo's firmware can weed them out. Although sometimes dirty contacts can trigger an error screen too so it's not foolproof.

This new method i found out about on youtube, it involves looking on the top edge of the cart the real copies have a indented moulded rectangle on the top edge. This is the video i found the method in, while i don't think there are huge amounts of people collecting DS on here nowadays it's a useful bit of info to know as certain popular games are now stupidly expensive.

https://youtu.be/yNm6cHq3QWE

Another good video showing how close fake makers are getting in doing DS stuff

https://youtu.be/6dF0vl69UMM

[fuse]

Nice share, always good to have extra techniques and things to check to avoid these problems.

I bought this "Bootleg Buddy" recently, and I'm expecting it to arrive this week. It comes with info cards on what to look for, as well as tools to get you into commonly bootlegged carts. I bought FF5 GBA from eBay recently, and although I'm 99% sure it's legit (it has an unscratched Club Nintendo code!), it's going to be my test case for doing just this.

Annoyingly though, having the cart in hand is one thing, but what I really need is to be able to do this remotely. I can imagine a lot of sellers aren't going to be very responsive to "can you take pictures of the PCB".

[importaku]

that kit looks super useful [MENTION=3822]fuse[/MENTION] ,yeah it's getting to the point where needing to see the pcb is gonna be mandatory for deciding to buy with so many fakes floating around there are some pretty high value GBA games out there. GBA is easily as bad as the DS situation for fakes they seem to be so many on the market. Hate how many they are on DS mostly they were focused on western stuff but even on Amazon Japan i'm not safe i have fallen foul twice so far and both times they were very convincing.

Was gonna treat myself to a few of my missing DS games off my list on Amazon J for xmas till i saw that the prices on a lot of stuff has gone mad. It has literally tripled in some cases, games that were only a couple of thousand yen when i last checked are now sitting closer to 6000 and a hell of a lot sitting in the 9000-10,000 mark and beyond making it a really risky proposition to buy from the marketplace on there. And some of those prices are for used copies, damn frustrating to say the least.