Rare ‘sample’ prototype of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) video game The Adventures of Batman & Robin, which was released in North America in December 1994. The game is housed in a Super Famicom cartridge shell that bears a blue-and-white Super Nintendo prototype label, which likely originated from Nintendo as a generic label to use for prototype and sample cartridges for both Japanese and PAL Super Nintendo games. An additional overlapping label with caption text reads “Sample, (RHO27), The Adventures of Batman & Robin, Sep. 1994.” The PVC inside of the shell is a well-documented Nintendo prototyping board, SHVC-4PV58-01, and all discernible manufacturing dates predate the game’s commercial release; stickers on the EPROM identify the label’s same product code (“027”) and the order of the chips (1 through 4). Encapsulated in a Wata certification holder, which grades the cartridge as “PRO.” Accompanied by a prototype evaluation report from Wata, which reads, in part: “The data is identical to the European release of the game, with the exception of a one-byte difference: 00007FAF is 0E on this cartridge, versus 00 on the retail game. This is the last byte before the game’s header and is extremely unlikely to affect gameplay. A logical explanation is that this is either an artifact of the chip burning process or is a watermark to prevent copying of the data by the recipient.”
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