Originally Posted by
Tanooki
The game technically was supposed to be a FX2 game but takes no real advantage of the extra speed or sprite capabilities of the chip so going with either FX1 or FX2 is fine. Due to that the cheap optimum is Stunt Race FX because it has the two perfect qualities needed which is a save battery for scores/pepper coins and the right size of memory needed on board to handle the sprite processing the game needs so it won't glitch. DOOM on the FX2 end has all that but no saving, and Yoshi has the save but it has not enough memory on the PCB board so it won't work, and yes while Winter Gold is 'perfect' it is a PAL chipset so you'd need to butcher in a NTSC chip onto that sucker so it would boot to an American system and that along with the rarer nature of the game makes it too costly. I've seen the thing run on a FX1 and FX2 processor and you really can't tell the difference.
Mind you if you were some speed hack hacker though with the right crystal oscillator (look up star fox 2, drakon on youtube) you can clock the chip up quite a bit higher which allows the game to run at faster running speed, though it still runs the same FPS. It gives a false sense of being smoother when all it does is just run the game at a faster overall pace is all.
Your best bet is to find someone who does a solid job on the cart. Taco! over on NintendoAge will hardwire a thick gauge wire for each pin on the chip that has starfox2 flashed to it to the main board with a good solid amount of solder so it will last. Many repro makers will halfass it up using very thin ribbon cable wire that's known to be much more likely to bust off there and as such fail. As long as you can find someone doing it with Stunt Race FX and using quality materials you'll be safe.