MEGA drive

The pirate Forgotten Worlds cart here doesn’t have any company logos, and its cartridge uses the western shell design but with a notch cut out to fit Japanese machines. Legitimate games don’t do this. When you start the game, the Sega logo is corrupted – pirates used to commonly remove official branding in this fashion.

Since Sega allowed third party publishers to manufacture their own Mega Drive games, there’s no single correct type of board or chip – but typically they’ll feature company logos of some kind, as seen on the legitimate cartridge.

The pirate game has no official logos on the chip or the board, and as you can see it’s a bit grubby inside.