Multiple early "black box" NES releases' cartridges produced during the console's US launch in Winter 1985 didn't use NES ROM chips, but rather Famicom ROM chips with a built-in converter. The 15 NES launch titles, and the only games known to have these chips, are:

•10-Yard Fight
•Baseball
•Clu Clu Land
•Duck Hunt
•Excitebike
•Golf
•Gyromite
•Hogan's Alley
•Ice Climber
•Kung Fu
•Pinball
•Stack-Up
•Tennis
•Wild Gunman
•Wrecking Crew

All of these games would eventually be reprinted with regular NES chips.

The US versions of Gyromite and Stack-Up did not have their title screens localized, so they retain the games' Japanese titles of Robot Gyro and Robot Block respectively.

In 2005, IGN released an April Fools' Day article suggesting that Gyromite would be getting a release for Game Boy Advance in the Classic NES Series line of games, presenting it as having been leaked by a pennysaver newspaper with an image of the supposed "mini-ROB" that would be included. The article could be rather convincing to someone unfamiliar with ROB up until the final sentence, which contains a joke comment from a Nintendo representative forgetting about the existence of Stack-Up.

However, if one is intimately familiar with ROB and the Classic NES Series, there are a few red flags that could expose the article's joke nature even if one weren't to check the publication date, particularly that the miniature ROB isn't facing towards the screen of the GBA, while the original NES ROB used a light sensor in its eyes pointed at the screen; the box art has the "Robot Series" logo at the bottom, despite no other Classic NES Series releases of black box titles keeping the series logos; ROB using Stack-Up blocks instead of Gyromite gyros; and the box art provided not being a different shape from an average GBA game to account for the bundled ROB.

The article also had a link to a colour version of the box art included, but that has since been taken offline and is most likely lost.

Gyromite is playable, and some may argue better playable, without using R.O.B. the Robot. You can push the pillars up and down using a second NES controller while the first controller commands Professor Hector as it would when playing with R.O.B., turning the game into either a faster-paced co-op platformer for two players, or an unconventional two-controller game for one player in a similar manner to Atari's Raiders of the Lost Ark. This technique cannot be performed on Stack-Up.