"Unreleased" mega drive game on Ebay

That's a well-known unlicensed game and one of the few sold here in the US during the Genesis's lifetime: Funny World and Balloon Boy

 

I bought a brand new sealed copy of this for $1 a couple years back, some guy was selling them on eBay also. Where do they get off calling it unreleased, what are they even basing that off of?

 

Possibly just an NTSC proto I'm guessing.. The game was only released in PAL territories in May of 95 from what I can gather, so anything later than that I'd assume was for another region and can't be anything to interesting.

 

Related: I picked up a Genesis cart at a flea market, label marked it as Sonic Classics, that compilation cart featuring Sonic 1, 2, and Mean Bean Machine. The label was in good condition, the connectors weren't marred, etc.

It struggled to post the copyright notice, but when it did, it booted directly into Sonic 1 - no menu. I reset it several times, and it did this consistently. Was it a Sonic Classics cart?

To find out, I had the ingenious idea of hooking it onto Sonic & Knuckles; I knew that Sonic 1's header had a special interaction with S&K (Blue Spheres), and that would confirm, definitively, if the ROM contained within was Sonic 1.

Blue Sphere came up, and I could adjust the numerical course selector. In fact, that cart was Sonic 1.

What remains is that I open the fucker up and see if it's a pirate cart with something like a joint soldered on the PCB that's forcing it to boot directly to Sonic 1, or if not, whether the cartridge was ever Sonic Classics to begin with.

Anyone had a similar encounter with a Sonic Classics cart?

EDIT: SEE BELOW

 

Hooking it up to S&K isn't really a clear indication that it contains only Sonic 1, since Blue Spheres can be accessed via Sonic Classics as well. That is curious, though.

 

I just read the wiki article on the cartridge, which is what I should have done in the first place. :specialed:

I want to avoid taking a Dremel tool to the cart like some kind of caveman, but I have never seen the beast which fits the hex key-like screw heads on Genesis carts.

 

That fucking asshole. The seller put that up on a local auction site, and I bought it there, and his response was that "sorry I already sold it on ebay and forgot to take it down from this site, also, it's not a beta but a chinese bootleg with the case disassembeld".
And THEN a day later he puts it up on ebay.

 

No Chinese bootleggers are going to pirate a game with those controller ports at the top. That sort of effort doesn't exist, they never even bother with the lock on slot for S&K, much less this lesser known game.

Guy sounds like grade A douche.