My question is in the title, I would like to hear from some of the big dogs that have these roms and why they really don’t want them released, as the excuse that the carts value will go down is absolutely absurd. It is only a matter of time before someone like myself releases them, I bought 2 of the rares and plan on buying the other 2 before the year is out, and could give a rats ass if those roms got released. There are a lot of people out there that could never afford to drop the amount of money it takes to get the rares, but shouldnt they be able to play the games anyway since isnt that what they were intended for, to be played. Thank you for your time in reading this rambling and for your responses.
Yeah, this one has been done plenty of times, but I’ll throw in the most important reason IMO… someone’s word. The person who lends the carts to be dumped will typically let someone borrow them only if they agree to just keep the dump for themselves and not release it. If people go ahead and release it because “it’s the public’s right to play the games”, then the people who own the rare stuff will never lend it out and there will be no preservation of rare stuff, and nobody but the people with the deep wallets will get to play it. It’s just a matter of playing by the rules, and IMO trust is one of the most important qualities… especially in a small community like the VB.
Why collectors don’t want the stuff released? Clearly it’s related to status, which is related to value. Since the games aren’t available to be downloaded, they hold sort of a superior status among VB games. It’s like a Lexus… they’re not that great, they’re just a Toyota… but the status that goes along with it makes it great (to people that “drink the Kool-Aid”). What if they started putting Lexus logos on all new Toyotas? Would a Lexus be great? I would lose a lot of respect for Lexus once I saw my friend driving his $12,000 Lexus Echo.
I remember the first time I played the 4 rare games at a friend’s house… I was blown away. Not because they were that great, but because they were 4 brand new games to me. This was MUCH more impressive than when I finally got Space Squash or Insmouse in their own dedicated cartridges. I had already played both of those in the emulator, and burned EPROMs of them and played them in my EPROM cart. I had no real reason to buy them except for completeness of my collection, so when I found them for cheap enough (~$75 each) I went ahead and bought them. If I hadn’t already been able to play them whenever I wanted, I would have definitely paid more since I wouldn’t have been able to wait for the right deal, and demand would have been higher.
But, in the end, money talks. If someone’s willing to spend several thousand $$$, then devalue their own carts by releasing the ROMs, that’s totally up to that person. Nobody can make you not release the ROMs. But don’t expect any more than one or two thanks, and the whole thing will be forgotten in a day or two… people on the internet just want things that they can’t have because they can’t have them.
I laugh when people talk about their “ROM collections”… how they have very different version of every game out there. I think… wow, that must have been tough to download the 80,000 NES/SNES ROM pack from bit torrent (good luck finding the game you want). It’s not just that the majority of people can’t afford the games, it’s that people want everything for free. Try selling the ROM for a fair price that people can afford. Very few people will buy it. Put it up for a free download and everyone will download it (and it’ll get played once in the emulator and forgotten). Look at $10 shareware… nobody buys it, but they’ll gladly go find the crack so they’re using the full version rather than an evaluation version. It’s just the whole “free” mentality. And don’t get me started on leeches profiting from other people. The day the ROMs hit the internet people will be trying to sell Flashboys pre-loaded with Virtual Bowling on ebay and stuff.
Heh, sorry… I think my post got a little bit long-winded and trailed off on a few tangents… but I’m sure the answer you’re looking for is in there somewhere 😉 .
To be completely fair, it has to be mentioned that the Gold NWC cart is the same ROM as the gray NWC cart… and the whole cart is a small collection of extremely common NES games, so it’s very unlikely that anyone would buy that to play, except for fun as a competition or something. It’s also worth imagining what it’d be worth if it had never been dumped. When you compare that to the rare VB games, which are completely different than any of the other VB games, and hardly anyone has played, then it’s pretty easy to see that it’s not really a good comparison.
I was writing a post saying more or less the same as DogP, but I wrote way too much and my session expired. I’m not going to write a 1-hour post again, so I’ll just point out a few things:
1.- The gold cart has its value as hardware because of production numbers and the way it was obtained (Nintendo Power Competition, etc.) Nobody buys the cart to play the games because it’s dumped.
2.- I bought the ER Virtual Boy games because I wanted a complete Virtual Boy collection AND I wanted to play them. If the ROM had been publicly available, I would have spent a lot on the ER games, but not as much as I did. i.e.:
MY INVESTMENT = PLAY THE GAME (70%) + COLLECT THE GAME (30%)
If the ROMS had been publicly available, I would have only paid 30% of what I paid. Yes, that’s a lot of money too, but I wouldn’t have paid the remaining 70% because I would have already played the games. And I can only speak of myself, but I guess that the other buyers would agree with me.
Also, of the NES Gold Cart there were only 26 made, but my guess is that of Virtual Bowling & SD Gundam (the two EER games out of the 4) the production numbers were in the thousands. 5,000? 10,000? I don’t know, but way more than those 26.
And lastly, one thing is clear: 100% of the people who lent their games to be dumped don’t want the ROM’s to be publicly available. Therefore, the only choice is that someone with the ability to make a ROM dumper makes it, dumps the games and releases them.
If you ask me if I mind or not that those 4 ROMs become publicly available, I don’t really mind because my vboy collection has more than the money value to me and I’m not thinking on selling it, but I wouldn’t release the ROMs if I dumped my copies of the games just for respect to those other collectors who don’t want the games to be publicly available.
funny story. I one time contacted nintendo america and told them i was a little kid diagnosed with brain cancer and that i would like nothing more than to have a copy of Dragon Hopper. they actually knew what i was talking about but wouldn’t let me have it so ;(
Let’s say that I really luck out and someone gives me access to a copy of Dragon Hopper somehow that I can play all I want, on the condition that I don’t leak it to the public.
Does that only apply to the game data itself, or would it be permissible for me to, say, Let’s Play the game and upload it all on YouTube for all to see?
They wouldn’t get the actual game from me, of course, but would showing off video footage of the game be problematic to these people?
Everyone is different. Typically collectors don’t want to be named publicly as owning the games because they know they’ll get harassed by people wanting the game, or more likely, people wanting the ROM for free. But most of the time they don’t mind posting anonymous pictures/videos, or letting a friend post the stuff for them, as long as they keep who owns it private. Like on my site I have pics of Faceball and Virtual Bowling prototypes… I was told that posting them on my site was no problem, but I can’t say who the owner is. There are others who like to keep the games completely to themselves as well though. And of course there’s others who love to show off their massive prototype collections. If you do come across Dragon Hopper though, as much as I’d hate to be teased by seeing the game without being able to play it, please do post pics/vids… I’d really like to see the game in action.
I never understood why the availability of a rom-image should affect the value of a cart. It’s the same as if a rare stamp would drop in price if I could view a picture of it online or if Mona Lisa wasn’t worth anything because I could have a reproduction for a few bucks. Or a rare book when I can view the content of it in digital form. I can get movies and MP3 for free everywhere and people still hunt for rare vinyl/DVD-editions. It’s normal that I can get copies everywhere. But it doesn’t change anything concerning the rarity of the original. Just video game collectors appear to think this way. Isn’t it weird? Besides there appears to be a different view on roms and ISOs. Anyone ever heard of people complaining about Radiant Silvergun-ISOs available online? No one cared and bid hundreds on this one everytime it appeared on ebay etc. I never understood this. I don’t pay that much money just to play a little bowling game. I pay because it’s rare.
i agree that the roms dont affect the price. what about jack bros? the price of that has been rising over the last couple of years even though the rom has been out for ages. and the prices of the rare games have been dropping for years before the roms were released. values change. the rom has little to do with that.
As I’ve said before… the reason it DOES affect the price is because video games have two sources of value… one is the ability to play it, and the other is collectability. How much that “playability” is worth is completely up to the buyer, but it does exist. Notice people have been saying if the ROMs get released that they’ll still buy the rare games, but wait for a good deal… if the ROMs aren’t released, then either they buy it if they really want to play the game (and have it for their collection), or not buy it if they don’t care too much about playing the game. Now, they’ll buy it if they want it for their collection, or not buy it if they really just wanted to play the game.
If you want to compare it to music, imagine a Beatles album that was sold at a small concert they played at before they were big (and with really early songs that weren’t available on other albums)… there were a few people there that know the record exists, but nobody knows where one can be bought (I say this to compare it to a very small release game, rather than a prototype). One day, one of these albums with unavailable Beatles songs pops up… is the original album worth more if the guy dubs the album to MP3s and releases them on the internet, or if he sells this album with music that’s unavailable anywhere else? If he releases it on the internet, does the original become worthless? Of course not… just like the video games… but the value is less.
Prototypes are even more dependent on whether the ROM is available… I don’t think there’s any need to argue this, because this has been proven MANY times. A recent VB example is the Space Pinball prototype… that was just an empty cart that somebody burned a copy of the ROMs onto… yet someone paid $1000 for it (whether or not they knew it wasn’t original, I don’t know). That was about $800 more than it was worth if the ROM was publicly available (the empty carts sold a few years ago for ~$150, and the 6 EPROMs could be worth ~$50). If the ROM gets released and someone does the same thing again, I guarantee it won’t sell for anywhere near $1000.
can you clarify what the ’empty carts’ were? im wondering why its worth $800 less if the rom was available.
and like bill cosby would say, ‘the proof is in the pudding’. look at the prices of the rare games, water world and jack bros. the rares dropped without the roms being released, water world slowly sank (no pun intended) but i doubt it was due to the rom, and jack bros keeps going up in value regardless of the rom being out.
we have to acknowledge the fact that there arent a ton of hardcore VB collectors out there and although the supply gets thinner, it often happens that people lose interest and prices drop.
Maybe you missed it, but those Space Pinball “prototypes” being sold on ebay are fakes… they’re a blank dev cart (which sold on Yahoo JP a few years ago for ~$150 each), that they burned the Space Pinball ROM to on some blank EPROMs. I picked up one of those carts: http://home.comcast.net/~virtual.boy/projectvb/tech/carts/nineprom.html … If the Space Pinball ROM was released tomorrow and I burned it to EPROMs and tried selling it on ebay, do you think I could get $1000 for it? The only value of the cart would then be the physical cart and the physical EPROMs (and a few bucks for labor of burning the chips). Therefore, the value with the ROM released would be the current price (>$1000) minus the physical price (~$200), or about $800 less.
About the prices of WW/JB, those aren’t relavent here, because those ROMs have been available “forever”… I’m not saying prices don’t fluctuate, I’m talking about the price difference between before the ROM is released and after the ROM is released.
i’m not arguing about those space pinballs being fake or not. i’ll take your word on that. i do, however, think that water world and jack bros are completely relevant. they exemplify exactly what we’re talking about. we can’t completely predict the way prices will fluctuate. also, as i stated before, the price of the carts for the four rare japanese games has been steadily dropping even before the release of the roms.
so if some games that are more widely available in both physical and rom formats, such as jack bros, are going higher in price, and then some that are not as widely available are going down in price, it would seem that the admittedly obvious logic involved in the prediction of their pricing is flawed. following the trend that has already been set, the release of the four rare roms will not affect the price as exclusively as some may think.
If you think that Jack Bros and Waterworld are relevant here, we’re arguing two completely different points. I’m not talking at all about price fluctuations/changes over long term, because yes… certain games increase/decrease/fluctuate in value over time, and for lots of reasons. I’m talking about the change in price at the instant that the ROM gets released, ie. Value1->ROM Release->Value2. The delta (Value2-Value1) is what I’m talking about. And the reason for the rares’ slow continuous drop in value could very well have been the ROM getting traded within the community.
Jack Bros and Waterworld have had their ROMs available for what I’ll call “forever”. To make a comparison to what I’m talking about, we’d have to go back to the day those ROMs were released and check prices before and after the release. But even that wouldn’t be a good comparison, because like I said… there’s value in being able to play the game, and also in collecting the cart. When these ROMs were released, there were no readily available flash carts, and VB emulation was basically non-existant.
If you want to somehow compare them, I still have never seen either of those two games sell for more than any of the 4 rare Japanese games… but the only thing these games have in common is that they plug into a Virtual Boy.
i dont think jack bros or water world work as a direct comparison to the rare games, since the price is quite different, but they can at least relatively exemplify what i was talking about. we’ve both raised some good points, though i think its time to agree to disagree. regardless of anything, i only need one more of the four rares and i plan on getting it next time i see it for sale.
Prices wont drop when games are dumped. Just look at the Dreamcast, a lot of the rare games are +$100, while you could easily download them. You don’t even have to chip the DC to play backups.
Rare games are simply interesting for collectors. A lot of those people even keep those games sealed and play a backup version. In this case, the owners of those rare games benefit from the dumped versions, because they’re sure their $xxx game won’t get damaged.
The reason a lot of owners don’t want the dumps to be released is simple. They want to be unique and play games that only a few on this earth would ever be able to play. More a show-off type of thing. They don’t want to share their experiences.
Ugh… I’m not even gonna start again… I’m just gonna state DC games at $100 is chump change… Jack Bros has been dumped for many years and still gets over $100… how many DC games sell for almost $1000?
