Just got in a USA SNES from ebay. Serial # is UN320962590. Board revision is a 1CHIP-03. Minor display glitches in Demon's Crest and Super G'NG confirmed from my own library. I'm hesitant to buy the older original boards like the CPU-01 because they are starting to fail with corrupted graphics. I have two older console revisions that have screwed up scaling and rotation now from old age. I suspect this will become more and more the case as time goes on. In fact I recently had to return an older model from an ebay auction as once again, the scaling and rotation functions were corrupted. In Pilotwings, the altitude meter will be corrupted. In Link to the Past, the opening triforce will often be completely missing, and the draw bridge in Castlevania IV will behave erratically. These are some examples of console graphic corruption (not to be confused with dirty lead corruption), and the behavior will be different and unique in each case. Edit: BTW, my 1CHIP-03 has no visible center stripe. I did several tests, including with FF3, and could not see it. By comparison, my APU revision SNES has a blatant center stripe.
Quick question, and this seems the best place to ask it though slightly off topic. How about the super famicom? I currently have a snes, bit its yellowed, case brittle and chiping apart, and honestly I just like the looks of the super famicom 100x more. I did a search about best super famicom consoles, and get no results like the super Nintendo. Is there as many different versions to look for in a super famicom and Jr versions or what? I'd hate to randomly buy a super famicom and find out it has worse graphics than another I could have easily got if I knew what I was looking for.
Afaict the SFC has gone through the same revisions as the US SNES, including a 'Jr' version. (PAL territories stopped getting updates after the '1CHIP' models.) The cues to differentiate between models ("dots of doom" vs "rings of great success" and whatnot) are probably very different though; I usually try to go by serial numbers instead.