Retropotenza

I was recently looking around on eBay, trying to find a Game Boy Advance copy of  Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past The first one that I bought had a strange looking label... so I decided to open it up and investigate a bit more. Once opened, it was evident that the  PCB  was indeed hosting a  flash  chip, even with pads to attach a programmer to it. On the left, a fake cart, on the right the original one. An original cart contains instead a  mask ROM , and a smaller  EEPROM  to store games saves (see the above picture). The issue of fake carts is that they store the game and its saves on the same  flash  chip, and that this kind of chip wears out much more quickly that an  EEPROM : you may lose all your progresses at any save 😱. I sent a complain to the eBay seller. He promptly refund the fake cart, without any further question, leaving it to me at the end.