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.
I’m not sure if you forgot to send the email, or if it got blocked for some reason, but I was able to find the bug and fix it, and I tested it w/ one of my apps. And I’ve got lots of fun stuff (and other less fun stuff) in this build :). I do agree about the Red Dragon menu, although I don’t have any plans on doing anything with that right now.
Nevermind… hopefully nobody started working on this… I was able to track down the bad opcode and it’s all good :). It would still be a nice utility, but it’s much less important now since I don’t know of any other bugs that are likely caused by bad opcodes.
I like Sonic games, but I think it’d seem really weird on a VB… I’ve never really liked any of the 3D style Sonic games though, so I’d probably prefer a side scrolling game, which of course would be much better suited for the VB hardware. A sidescroller with some 3D, in the style of Wario Land or something similar could probably work well though.
I don’t remember whether it was ever publicly released/posted, but it was being developed by DanB. Last thing I remember was that it looked good, but ran really slowly. I dunno whether he has any plans of continuing work on it. I would like to see that though… and DanB: if you’re abandoning it, I’d be interested in the source to see what kind of optimizations could be done. I have actually been craving Descent lately, and a Descent game for the VB would be AWESOME… and I think Yeti might be a good base for that .
I still occasionally work on the project, but it’s not the top on my priority list… and Jorgeche’s Mario VB is much more complete, so hopefully he, or someone, will complete that game. Eventually, I’d like to use the engine that I was building for this Mario game to either make another Mario style game, or another side scrolling game like Megaman.
shags wrote:
My dumper seems to work fine my problem is dogp’s program to merge the 2 files (it gets dumped as 2 seperate files that need to be merged) doesnt seem to work for me
If my merging program doesn’t work for you, you’re not getting a good dump. It works for everyone else, and if you make a hex file of all 0x00’s and another of all 0xFF’s, you’ll see the output will be 00FF00FF00FF00FF… exactly like it should be.
shags wrote:
Well DogP figured me out, I do have a dumper but why waste the time trying to get them to dump when the roms were handed to me so that they would get released
I can think of plenty of reasons:
1) These ROMs weren’t yours to give out… it’s not like you were the first to think… hmm, I got some ROMs, I should release these… the people that dumped these agreed not to publicly release them, which is why they weren’t (if things can’t stay private, collectors will never let us dump their stuff because they know it’ll get released). I honor my word, so when I say I’ll keep something private, I do.
2) It would have been nice to have another dump to compare, since these all came from a single source, which could have been bad. But I’m guessing you don’t have a dumper or even any of the carts.
3) It’s very disrespectful to those who actually worked hard to get these games backed up (and to the collectors who paid lots of $$$) to have someone release them and especially claim that they dumped them.
Clearly you have none of the same morals as me. And whoever sent you the ROMs made a mistake in trusting you.
You don’t actually owe shags anything… all he did was distribute ROMs that he probably agreed not to… and then claimed that he dumped them. You owe the people who originally dumped them a thank you.
You poser… those aren’t your dumps. The thread title should be “I got someone else’s dumps and I’m gonna claim I dumped them”… I’ll bet that was a lot of “hard work”. No need to thank shags for these. I was hoping to see fresh dumps so we can confirm that those are good… what a loser.
shags wrote:
Now is the last chance to let me know why you think they should or shouldnt be released, maybe you can sway my decision.
shags wrote:
there is nothing that would stop me from releasing them
So this post really is pointless 😛 … but yeah… that’s cool that someone is finally gonna publicly release them. Maybe when the prices drop I’ll pick up SD Gundam and Virtual Bowling 😉 .
Not sure what the point of this post is… but I’ll say the same thing I always say… they’re your games, you’re free to do whatever you want with them. It will devalue your games, so if you’re okay with that, then go for it. If you’re doing this for attention/praise, you’re gonna be disappointed… you’ll be lucky to get a couple thanks for it. And once it gets to the ROM sites, nobody will even know where they came from. The games aren’t that great, so they won’t actually get played much… but people really want the ROMs for their “ROM collections” because they’re not freely available.
So yeah… do whatever you want… our opinion shouldn’t matter, unless you’re just trying to get people to beg for them.
That’s the Japanese version, which is worth less than the US version, but I wouldn’t say that’s a bad price (although I haven’t been watching prices lately). It’s pretty common to find the JP version complete with the box though… US games seem to be harder to find complete.
Another thing that would be nice is if gcc padded the ROM to the next size w/ 0xFF rather than 0x00 (for faster chip burning, and also so I can quickly tell how big my program by watching the progress bar in the burning software). I guess since I pad the ROM every time anyway, I could just get rid of the auto padding in the linker and I’d avoid the vbvectors problem as well as padding the ROM with 0xFFs.
If you want to make new cables, it’s pretty easy… but IMO not really worth the time/hassle. The original cables are rarely bad… it’s just the connection between the cables and the display PCB. Cutting the cable doesn’t need to be very precise though, so cutting it with the plotter would probably be overkill.
