Just read through the posts. Nobody sounded like a douchebag and everyone made valid points.
I realized too late that retrocollect was mostly PAL so that was my bad for not lurking more before posting. I saw that this site was made by a redditor and was primarily US so I wanted to try my luck here.
I don't want to deal with eBay for the reasons mentioned above, among other things. eBay takes a cut of every sale, and that also means I have to use PayPal. Paypal takes another cut of the sale. I'm not big on fees and middle men; which is why I'm testing the waters on collector communities such as this one.
To clear things up a bit too; I am not a hoarder or pawn shop businessman by any means. I bought Hagane a long time ago without even knowing that it was a rare or desirable item. I bought it from my local video store (for like $10) because I had rented it from there a few times as a kid. I also beat it many times and got to the point where I could do it on hard without dying. I used to have the locations of all the blue flame life powerups memorized and had the timing down on the power attacks (hold L or R to flip and hit jump or attack after X amount of flips). When I say I "recently discovered" it is purely in terms of discovering how much it's worth now. I'm getting older and having less and less time for my video game hobbies (what little time I do have to play games gets dedicated to Guilty Gear XRD on PSN,) so if I can cash in on a purchase I made as a teenager then why not?
Anyway I didn't mean to offend your community by making a marketplace topic right out the gate. I actually had trouble registering initially and my exact email to Matt said "I tried registering but it didn't send a verification email. Could you help me out? I'd like to sell a copy of Hagane," and he did so I didn't realize it was taboo to do that.
Getting back to business, here are pictures of the ROM chip inside the cart. My screwdriver bit came in the mail this morning
Backside of the chip with cart label:
http://i.imgur.com/s0GtbL2.jpgFront of the chip:
http://i.imgur.com/Ev4G3U7.jpgAccording to nintendoage forums topic
http://m.nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=5&threadid=134697 it's a legit chip. I'm adding links to these pics in the OP too.
I'm not in a huge hurry to sell this, so I'll let this topic ride for a bit before trying to sell it elsewhere.