I haven't heard both names, but I presume you mean these :) http://www.pieces-zine.com/200905cotton/images/qtips.jpg

I just call them "Ear cleaners" directly translated from swedish  or "Cotton sticks"

Yep thats them.

Alright. I tried playing Final Fantasy III today just for the heck of it, and guess what?... It worked!

Or at least it kinda worked. First time it crashed after the intro. Second time I got it to work after many tries it crashed after I had beaten the crap out of some village guards and their dogs.
Third time I got it to work I got to the mine where I saved at a save point. Then the game froze after a random encounter later.
Fourth time I loaded from the mine (Battery memory seems to work fine), got to the boss and killed him, the esper killed the soldiers and terra woke up with the slave crown removed. This is as far as I have gotten without the game freezing or crashing.
I guess it does this because it loses the connection to the console because when I press reset it won't start again.

So what do you guys think, bad converter or bad cartrige? I hope it's just that my converter is bad, although it lets me play the japanese FFV perfectly fine.

I think for someone with a sega avatar i'm disappointed.
To be honest I think it's an old game on an old machine and it still works.
Count your blessings. I hope disc based machines have such a long life.

What do you mean by that?

i wish i still had my snes, had a as new condition console and sold it in a massive job lot on ebay.

its to much to get all that back again.

hope u get ur game working, but it is very very old now.

Playing on the Snes. Sure time has moved on but some of us still keep the pointless old sega/nintendo war going.

Well, I still have more games for my Megadrive than for my SNES.

The SNES and Megadrive are both hooked up in the same room, and so far it has worked great. The two consoles haven't tried to kill each other yet :)

If they can co-exist then maybe people can live together in perfect harmony.