Ever since I got my first unlicensed NES carts in something called ”NES Happy Packs” from a Danish outlet called CAT Computer, later Scandinavian Computer Club, I have always had a special interest in the obscure stuff – and when it comes to being obscure, pirate stuff is way up there.

I have seen a lot of crazy pirate stuff over the years, so much that I didn’t think anything could surprise me again – but I was wrong. A few weeks back I was randomly browsing ebay, something I do not do as often as I used to.

Anyway, these odd looking Game Boy Advance cartridges appeared, twice as tall as a regular GBA cartridge – there was just no way these could be official, and after a bit of searching, Reddit to the rescue, I learned that these most likely are very early Game Boy Advance pirate/bootleg carts out of China. I have seen quite a few GBA pirates over the years, but never something like this and I was instantly hooked on getting some of these.

Today a small package with 3 of these bootleg carts arrived, Pac-Man Collection, Tweety & the Magical Gems and last but not least, Fortress – one of the early GBA titles I played a bit for whatever reason – the game is not that great in my opinion.

So these are indeed Game Boy Advance cartridges, they play just as any other GBA cart, even though they are twice as tall as a regular GBA cartridge. All 3 feature somewhat blurry labels, with a gamepak code like AGB-AFOE-3020 (Fortress), where 3020 seems to be consistent for all releases, what it means though, I do not know. The cartridges dumped just fine with a JoeyJr dumper and seems to be an exact match to the US versions – the label also writes USA.

One can only wonder why this size was chosen, and then seemingly quickly abandoned again. The internals looks like something out of a Game Boy/Game Boy Color pirate cart, maybe at first the Chinese pirate outlets were not capable of cramming everything into a regular sized cart, especially when there also needed to be room for a battery.

The carts features 2 x M6MF16S2AVP flash memory chips, each with a storage capacity of  16mbit, which makes sense as all 3 games I have are 32mbit games. But what we have here it pretty much a flash cartridge of sorts?

The “Gameboy Advance tall pirates” are even taller than a regular, classic, Game Boy DMG/Color cartridge.

Anyway that’s pretty much all I know about these obscure pirate carts at this point, if you know more about these, feel free to let me know.