Hi!

Don't know much about NES rarities and don't find anything about this one.
It's  a normal grey NES Cart with a white label.On it from top to down:

NES-P-WO

Nintendo

SUPER OFF ROAD

--------------------

SAMPLE GAME PAK

BY NINTENDO


So anyone can tell me is it a rare cart?
Some ideas for a price?

Thanks!

Got a pic? That would help :)

http://i5.tinypic.com/20ijnzd.jpg


:)

Average price is around $130-$150. Some people will pay upwards of $200 for it though. Hope that helps :)

Thanks for your help!

I'm very happy :)

If you open it up and take a picture of the circuit board, it will help attract buyers.

ok,i will do it later.

But why?
Is threre something speciall?

It's a preview copy, a prototype. The inside contains special chips (EEPROM's), the game could have differences then the released version.
If you could open it op and make a pic we could see if all is well, or at least ligit. It looks legit though you never know with these things. Were ya get it btw?

Looks nice, and I'm interested in knowing where you got it aswell. :)

here's the pic.

http://img23.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=11063_CIMG0827_367lo.jpg

Hope it's good enough  :-/


I bought it on ebay.de but dont know about the sample pak.
There was only a pic of the Box and when it arrived... surprise :)

And it works.

So anything special with it?

There ya go, it's a proto. Congrats on the nice find. Now the best thing to do is compare it with the retail version and see if there are any differences. ;)

Great find.  You don't see very many actually Nintendo proto's either.  How much did you pay for it if you don't mind me asking?  If you plan on selling it, put it on ebay.com with a BIN of like 149.99, and I just about guarantee it will sale.  I might even do 175.  Good luck
~~NGD

What's the release date for super off road?  It's missing on the first list I checked and the second place I checked said April 1990.  Another website said 1989.

That's not an official NES dev board.  It's a reproduction style dev board.  That's not unheard of for protos, but can be faked very easily.  

What's weird to me is that the nstc CIC chip has a date of 9017.  That's the 17th week in 1990 which is pretty late April already.  I'm not positive on the release date for the game, but it looks to me that the sample board here was not have been made before the release of the game.

Does anyone know what the P in the nes-p-wu is supposed to mean?  Is that supposed to be P for Pal?  There's a p on the nes open golf and the  yoshi actual prototypes found in sweden some time ago.  The P being Pal may help the case in this being the Pal version, but then it does have the US CIC chip.  The pal version probably being released later would help the case for this proto.

The label really does look like a sample game label.  I think I've even seen Nintendo labels that looks almost exactly like this.  Does anyone remember another proto with an almost exact label typle like this?  Not just similar, but basicaly an exact match but different game...

Something else that's odd is the fact that Super off Road seems to be the first game to use the amrom board type.  Usually when a proto is made reproduction style, they steal the board from another game.   If Super off Road is the first Amrom game as I think it is, it looks like a super off road board has been stolen to make a super off road sample game.  

The only thing I can think of is that they stole the US super off road board to work on the pal game.  Assuming that super off road was released in PAL, I would love to compare the pal dump to the US dump to see if it is indeed different.  There are just so many little odities about this "proto" that I'd also love to see a dump of it and compare it to the final versions.  Honestly, if it turns out that this is the US final version, I would be crying fake, unless we can trace a history on it.

If it is just the PAL version, I don't think we'll find major game differences since it already has had a US release.  

Thank you all for help!

I will let you know if i want to sell it  :D

Or just check ebay for NES Super Off Road - Prototyp the next time  ;)

(Ps: i bought it on ebay.de for only $5 !)

Wow....you got a good deal. If I was you I would put it on ebay.com for about $225 with Best Offer. I'm sure you could sell it for close to $200 on there :)

Damn, thats probly the luckiest find so far this year. Buying a game thats listed like a normal game, only stock photo (or pic of box) and recive a prototype :o I dont even know what the odds for that is, but its probly 1000000:1

The game was released in Europe. The Scandinavia release was released 14th March 1991 and uses the EEC code. The french and german releases uses their normal codes, FRA and NOE. I dont know when they where released over there tho.

This is the first prototype i see that only have 1 EPROM, is that normal for some prototypes?

nice find. its a sweet game by the way too~ 4 palyer!

There are many one chip games.  

The short:  The left chip that looks like a rom chip is a ram chip.  Therefore it wouldn't be an eprom!

The long:  Most nintendo games have two rom chips.  They are called CHR and PRG.  

CHR stands for Character, not game characters but rather the game graphics.  The characters of our alphabet make up sentences and paragraphs.  The characters of NES games are sprites which are combined to make up all of the graphics.  All of the sprites are held in the CHR rom.  Graphics need to be in the CHR spot for the NES to access them.

PRG stands for program.  All of the code is then in the PRG rom.

Some games store the code and the graphics and the code on the PRG and have a ram chip for the CHR (then called CHR-RAM).  Since ram is easily changed and rom is not changeable, CHR-RAM allowed programmers to do some things that they couldn't do with static CHR-ROM.  The game will take the graphics off the PRG and store them in the RAM so the graphics are where then NES can access them.

There were many Nintendo boards made for CHR-RAM.  There are too many to list, but this Super Off Road is one of them.  CHR-RAM isn't as common as CHR-ROM, but Zelda 1, Mega Man 1,2,4,6, and even California Raisins use Chr-Ram (among many others).

Therefore, any prototype with CHR-RAM will always be a one eprom prototype.

Ok, thanks for the info :) Is this game really made my Nintendo? I never knew.

Ya know, I forgot about that fact.  Tradewest was the US publisher, but Nintendo was the PAL publisher, correct?  I'm too lazy to check but that would mean that there's probably a simple "title screen" change between nstc and pal.