EarthBound Cartridge (SHVC-1J3M-20) SuperCIC Key

Ahh yes, trusty old EarthBound also known as:

EARTH BOUND NTSC
24Mbit (3MB)
ROM and SRAM
64 kbit (8kB)
FastROM
English

SHVC-1J3M-20
1 indicates number of ROM chips.
J means HiRom
3 means 8kB SRAM
M is MAD-1 chip

After realising my CIC chip was missing from my EarthBound cart when trying to play on my non-modded Super Famicom, I knew I wasn’t in for a good time. I’m still not entirely sure what happened to my SuperCIC (lock) modded Super Nintendo.

Anyway the Super Nintendo / Super Famicom uses a lock (console) and key (cartridge) lockout system to make sure you are playing the right game on the right console. Who doesn’t enjoy region locking? Just about every consumer ever!

I’d previously used the PIC16F630 (8-pin chips) for the lock (SuperCIC) but now it’s time to try the opposite, the key in the cartridge. Since mine is missing and I happened to have a spare PIC12F629, maybe this was meant to happen five years ago, who knows! So I went ahead and flashed supercic-key.hex to a PIC12F629 with the trusty TL866CS…

and completed the soldering work…

and triple checked the pinout from http://www.dbwbp.com/…only to forget the CLK line!

It was all worth it though as the Super Famicom booted up.

Will it continue to work through the copy protections? Time will tell, sooner or later. Time will tell.

Edit: Found a note from myself about half a decade ago.

Remove CIC from Cartridge (otherwise lockout activates… why?)
http://www.cs.umb.edu/~bazz/snes/helpful/SuperCIC.html
http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?t=8884

References
http://www.dbwbp.com/index.php/10-electronic-projects/24-snes-cart-region-free-modification-replacing-cic-lockout-chip-with-supercic
https://sd2snes.de/blog/cool-stuff/supercic
https://hackmii.com/2010/01/the-weird-and-wonderful-cic/
http://nintendoallstars.w.interia.pl/romlab/cart_types.htm
http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?t=8289
http://www.snescentral.com/article.php?id=0909
http://nintendoallstars.w.interia.pl/romlab/cart2epr.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20120712033436/http://snesdev.romhack.de/game_select.htm
http://www.mcumall.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=4858
https://web.archive.org/web/20161219041616/http://emu-docs.org/Super%20NES/Cartridges/sfcdev2.php