> It's wild that the Super 3D Noah's Ark unlicensed game didn't have its own CIC chip and required plugging an official cartridge on top to pass the copy protection check. Goes to show the lengths publishers had to go to bypass Nintendo's strict licensing. I wonder how many other unlicensed carts used similar CIC workarounds.

Super 3D Noah's Ark is the only game that seems to have survived to modern times, but I remember there were quite a few more. Nintendo wasn't happy about the religious-themed games but knew it would be extremely bad press to go after the developers, so they strong-armed the major retailers instead. I used to see the games developed by Wisdom Tree in Christmas stores, book stores, and small regional retailers.

In non-western countries, there were pirated games that used the same "piggyback" technique to avoid the CIC, but this was less common since PCBs were pretty expensive to manufacture in smallish quantities at the time. Console game piracy didn't _really_ take off until CDs became the dominant format. Arcade game piracy actually had a pretty robust underground market, though.

The lengths manufacturers of unlicensed cartridges would go to circumvent the CIC were pretty interesting. These carts and early Famicom adapters (which didn't have a CIC) would 'zap' the CIC to keep it resetting. Then Tengen made their own CIC knockoff for their games (they made unique plastic cases for their cartidges too)