Tower of Radia PROTO up for sale!!
Well, its been fun, and I am glad I had the opportunity to bring this game to so many of you, but really a prototype has no place in my collection at the moment. There are a few items I still need for the NES and hopefully this will help fund them. So, feel free to make an offer (including a Flintstones 2 manual in your offer will help A LOT, lol). Really I just wanted to be the first to tell you that this sucker is up for grabs!!
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=200224947035&ssPageName=STRK:MESE:IT&ih=010
Comments
Even though it is dumped it is still a nice looking proto. I bet you could get 300+ for it if you try. Also makes good trade bait.
~~NGD
~~NGD
I mean the nwc is dumped but that price doesn't come down(with 50%)!
ok it is the holy grail,but arent all unreleased games(dumped or not)real treasures for a collection?
SO what its dumped! If the 50 limited releases ever become hot(unlimited can become a problem here)5 years from now under the 50.000 nintendoage members you can say i have the original copy
I think most people place value on a proto based on the exclusivity of being one of the few to be able to play a game.
Why do they lose there memory?
They use a crystal that reacts to current. To write to them, you send a current through them to lock portions into either an on or off position. To erase them, you expose them to UV light, or run current through them again. Over time, the crystal supposably loses the charge that holds the bit in the on/off position, thus creating bad data.
The best part is you may never notice if you don't fully play the game! The bits that gets corrupt could be graphics so a pixel is wrong, or could be completely unused space, or it could be code that inserts bugs or makes it crash. Of course a proto that is the same as the release version could get bitrot, then dump as different and be worth more!
Starting with Sudoku 2007 I do not use UV EPROMs, so the RetroZone games will not die (anytime before the plastic/paper decomposes). One Time Programmable (OTP) ROM use fuses inside that fry when programmed so the programming cannot be reversed.
Nintendo production games use a Mask ROM, which are physically created already programmed. They also cannot get bitrot.
Why does the price has to come down(with almost 50%) now its dumped?
I mean the nwc is dumped but that price doesn't come down(with 50%)!
ok it is the holy grail,but arent all unreleased games(dumped or not)real treasures for a collection?
SO what its dumped! If the 50 limited releases ever become hot(unlimited can become a problem here)5 years from now under the 50.000 nintendoage members you can say i have the original copy
there are many ways to explain this but lets try this.
If you had $1000 and you could buy this or a new undumped NES proto no one had ever seen before which one would you pick? Its easy to see now which has more appeal isn't it?
That undumped factor has a value. The original sale was for an NES proto AND the undumped factor. After you dump the ROM now you have just the NES proto. Which still has value but its clearly worth less to just about everyone.
Still I must say I like the label !
The hype may be overblown, but it is something that absolutely will happen eventually. Could take 50 more years or be happening right now. There's many things that affect lifetime like manufacturing process and quality of the programmer originally used. Atari and arcades are only now getting to where it is more of a problem, so NES should have ~10 more years before it is more common. Protos from Atari have been permanently lost, and some NES carts like Panesians have been killed. See http://www.nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=... for lots more tech info.
The best part is you may never notice if you don't fully play the game! The bits that gets corrupt could be graphics so a pixel is wrong, or could be completely unused space, or it could be code that inserts bugs or makes it crash. Of course a proto that is the same as the release version could get bitrot, then dump as different and be worth more!
Starting with Sudoku 2007 I do not use UV EPROMs, so the RetroZone games will not die (anytime before the plastic/paper decomposes). One Time Programmable (OTP) ROM use fuses inside that fry when programmed so the programming cannot be reversed.
Nintendo production games use a Mask ROM, which are physically created already programmed. They also cannot get bitrot.
I don't think bit rot is at all common with Atari games either. I think Tempest over at AA said he has 1 and that was due to other factors (water or something)
Atari games would be a good meter thou. Once Atari collectors start screeming well then you know how much time you have left.
Manufacturing quality in the insulator progressed between Atari and NES, but the gate features also got smaller (holds fewer electrons) so I don't know if that would make the time between system failures longer or shorter. Protos generally used just whatever chips were sitting around so they could have been fabricated many years before proto programming anyways.