Right, because pirated carts and devices to play "back-ups" off various discs and memory devices were not available for Nintendo based systems. Give me a break. If you really want to control piracy, there are other ways to do it besides creating custom formats.
Bootleg N64 carts were reportedly too expensive to be profitable. Clearly this trend did not hold for the DS or GBA.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." --Bertrand Russel (attributed)