Metal Gear NES variant

[livingfora1up]

Recently, I got a the security bit needed to open my nes carts and I began the long and painstaking task of cleaning the contacts of my collection and my duplicates as well. When I opened up a metal gear cart I noticed that konami was printed on one of the roms and the chip itself as well. So being curious I opened up another copy of metal gear and found that it was different on the inside (roms are placed differently). the outside of the carts are identical except for the back sticker. The cart in question has the number 24 printed on it, where the other one has it's number imprinted like most carts. I dont know anything about the inner workings of cartridges or if variations like this are entirely common. Any help here?

Also, sorry about the crappy picture

[badinsults]

I'm more of a snes guy, but it is not really uncommon for differently set up chipboards for games. For instance, there are versions of Final Fantasy III for the snes that have 1 or 2 rom chips, even though they use the same rom version. I have three copies of Donkey Kong Country, and they all have different chipboard setups. Ultimately it is the content of the chips themselves that make the difference, and unless it is designated with a modifier on the serial code, it is unlikely to be any different when it comes to playing on the actual system.

[VileRedFalcon]

Aparently there are several hardware profiles for Metal Gear. Check out Bootgod's NES Cart Database: http://bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/profile.php?id=1179

[MichaeltheGreat]

Sometimes konami made their own circuit boards, and sometimes they bought them from nintendo. The one with the verticle prg is a circuite board made by konami. Neither are really rarer than the other.