Quote Originally Posted by Zoe F View Post
The anti-piracy measures were put in so pirates would have a more difficult time making and selling cheap bootleg carts. A lot of pirates improperly dumped games, paid little attention to things like the amount of SRAM a game requires, worked to hack title screens and copyright information, etc. A lot of Nintendo's later games had similar anti-piracy measures in place.

Though I haven't personally tried it, a properly dumped ROM should work perfectly fine on the Powerpak. If you're still nervous about it, use the Earthbound (U) [f1].smc ROM image that's floating around the Internet. It should be easy enough to locate.
The protection was more about preventing users from using copiers back in the heyday. Pirate carts were far less rare than copiers, especially in the Far East. Improper dumping has nothing to do with it, if the games weren't properly dumped, the shops would not be able to sell the resulting ROM on floppies as was extremely common. The main protection scheme was that of SRAM size checking, if a cartridge that didn't use SRAM was able to read/write from the copiers SRAM, it knew it was being run on a copier. Likewise if a cart used a smaller SRAM size than the copier's, it could read/write to the upper address range and determine it wasn't running on an original cart. The powerpak should automatically limit the SRAM properly.