Ahh yes, trusty old EarthBound also known as:

EARTH BOUND NTSC
24 Mbit (3 MB) ROM
64 kbit (8 KB) SRAM
HiROM / FastROM
English

SHVC-1J3M-20
1 = one ROM chip
J = HiROM
3 = 64 kbit / 8 KB SRAM
M = MAD-1 family decoder

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 14-pin PIC16F630 for the console-side SuperCIC lock, but now it was time to try the opposite: a SuperCIC key in the cartridge. Since my original CIC was missing and I happened to have a spare 8-pin PIC12F629, maybe this was meant to happen five years ago. Who knows! So I went ahead and flashed supercic-key.hex to the PIC12F629 with the trusty TL866CS…

and completed the soldering work…

and triple checked the pinout from DBWBP’s SuperCIC key tutorial… 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.

Update: I later found an old note from myself that reminded me I’d removed the donor CIC during my 2013 experiments with this homemade EarthBound cartridge. My guess then was that the PAL donor cart was giving the console’s SuperCIC the wrong region for the replacement game. That experiment is documented in SNES SuperCIC Switchless Modchip - More Testing (Part 3). This time, at least the cartridge has its own SuperCIC key!

Sources