> At least 2 Chinese companies manufactured Sega carts (Atomiswave, which is similar to > Naomi) : > Xing Le and San Star LTD. > I don't know if they are considered to be bootlegs or unlicensed copies ?! > What's the difference between bootleg and original cart ? Are they exact the same > copies (hardware vise) of original carts or the only diff. is licensing (they break > the copyright law) ?
depends
for this one they replace the protection chip with an FPGA and instead of real time decryption they fetch pre-decrypted data from a previously unused area of the ROM (but otherwise don't modify the game code)
for the Atomiswave bootlegs apparently most of them were made from a faulty copy of the game (or earlier faulty bootleg) so there are corrupt backgrounds and frames of animation in a lot of them.
some of the NeoGeo ones have weird access timing causing even more glitches and slowdowns than the system already had (also with Garou the majority are based off a hacked version of the prototype as there's no final version without encryption and custom banking)
in other cases the bootlegs are unauthorized extra cartridges produced at exactly the same time as the originals to the same standards.