All the stuff I bought at MAGFest

Of course I had to try out all the new stuff I got.

Everything that powers on reliably

• Secret of Mana: It has all four saves in use with parties of varying levels, including one that's close to the end of the game.  I've searched around the internet and found that there's no official way to delete the data from a given slot, but the general trick to wiping any cartridge's SRAM is simply to repeatedly hit the reset switch.  The constant switchover from one power source to another for the SRAM chip will eventually cause it to be unpowered for just long enough for the data to disappear.  It's brute-force, but it'll work.
• Donkey Kong Country: It had a save near the beginning of the game, I erased it and started over.  Fun game is fun, and according to my save I've already got 49% completion.
• Street Fighter II Turbo: this game doesn't have an SRAM chip, but as long as the console is powered on, your options appear to be preserved.  Even if you hit the reset switch.  That's neat, I guess.  That being said, it's readily apparent that the game would massively benefit from having a controller with a button layout similar to the 6-button Sega Genesis controller.  Using the L/R buttons on a regular SNES controller for heavy punch/heavy kick is awkward, to say the least.  I know, I can rebind in the options, but something will end up on L/R and I don't really want to just not use some of my input options.  I've played a bit of it, but I'm not that great at fighting games.  I just like to dick around, so my play time testing out the cartridge consisted of Hadoken spam.  I wanted to have a non-Gundam fighting game on the SNES, though, and this was a pretty good option.
• The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: When I first tried it, it took a little careful nudging before it would boot, but I came up with a consistent way to nudge it into the right spot (press gently on the eject button and then power-cycle the console), and then more recently it's started right up without issue.  Either there was no save data on the cartridge, or my efforts to get it to boot resulted in the cartridge's SRAM getting wiped.  I started a new game and have been progressing nicely through the dark world.

I've mostly been going back and forth between Donkey Kong Country and A Link to the Past.

The ones that take a bit more effort

• Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars: For some reason, this cartridge puts the cartridge connector in a death grip, making it difficult to insert and remove.  Is this normal for games that use the SA-1 expansion chip?  It also makes nudging difficult, but the method I came up with for A Link to the Past provides a good starting point.  Since it uses the SA-1 expansion chip, it exposes the problem with the incorrect power being provided by the generic power supply I have: there's a red/green/blue horizontal color gradient moving down the screen.  Once nudged into the correct position, the game is playable (with the aforementioned color issue).  However, it's very sensitive to any kind of light shock or vibration, and I'm worried it'll fuck up my save data or something if I actually dig into the game.  There's one save on the cartridge that's near the end of the game, I hit New Game just to play a bit of the beginning but didn't actually save my progress.
• Blaster Master: This one is incredibly temperamental.  I usually either get a solid blue screen or a blinking blue screen when I insert it and power it on.  After a bit of careful nudging with no real method to its madness that I've found so far, it does eventually boot up and I've played far enough to die horribly on the first boss.

I'm hoping that these two will just sort of magically work better after I clean their contacts, I honestly don't know what other options I have.  I know it's the cartridges and not my NES/SNES, because everything else I put in either of them boots up on the first try.

The multitap and controller

• Multitap: It works perfectly, and Secret of Mana apparently requires it to be connected to the second controller port.  I don't have any games other than Secret of Mana that will use it, so I can't really test ports three or four on it.
• Third-party turbo controller: It's a bit janky and needs some work to function properly.  It has a switch on the back that applies turbo to the Start button, I have no clue why that's desirable as a feature, but it was switched on when I plugged the controller in and it took me a while to figure out what was going on.  Now for the actual issues that prevent it from being useful right away: The right button on the d-pad also inputs up unless I hold it in a very specific manner.  Also, the Y button doesn't work at all until its turbo is turned on.  These sound like issues that could be fixed, but I don't know how easy they would be to fix.

Overall

Incredibly happy with my purchases.  Still kind of kicking myself for not also grabbing Super Metroid as soon as I saw it, but hey, I can't do anything about that now.  eBay seems to be the best choice for genuine SNS-002 power supplies, so I guess I'm going to have to bitchslap Virginia Credit Union so they'll actually let me spend money via PayPal...