You are a saint, sir 🙂 Looking forward to the release and I’ll do what I feel I can when you have your donation page up.

I wonder if maybe a little spray with a compressed gas can into the optical bit would help. I imagine even a faint speck of dust on that thin red array would show as a line when the mirror’s finished stretching it out.

Not quite getting the “moves as you move your head” bit.

Does the line crawl? And how are you moving your head relative to the unit? Are you just standing back and moving around?

Also, is the line horizontal or vertical?

I may have to look into getting some of that glue myself(have a Saturn mem card with a lifted lead). That looks sweet. Kudos! 🙂

Here’s what I found out:

This guy remembers starting his store around the time the lawsuit was threatened against Sony(and maybe Microsoft). Nintendo wasn’t actually named but followed suite voluntarily anyways to avoid the wrath of the angry French parents.

The Virtual boy had already risen and fallen at that time. So it doesn’t appear the VB games ever had standard French manuals. Some may have, but it wouldn’t have been standardized. This guy doesn’t remember ever seeing one himself.

As an aside, my boxed copy of Star Tropics for NES has a French side on the instruction manual. So that’s why I’m leaving open the possibility that maybe some of the few titles had French instructions, it’s just not likely.

nice app find!! 🙂

indeed. take pictures if you can 🙂

Dream Games:

*Falldown(where you must fall down through available holes of fast approaching floors)
*PilotWings Redeye
*Bahamut Lagoon 3D
*Panzer Dragoon Rieg

And that would be a bad thing?

I’d love to see it released too. The last debacle was very unfortunate. I still stand by you on that one 🙂

How hard is it to find a 31 in 1 NES game cart. Same thing applies.

The morality of the original point of sale aside, what Robert has in his possessions could be considered collectible. Even if nowhere near as valuable as the true item.

Since he’s presumably not the one pressing them out, any morality issues are thin so long as he doesn’t try selling it uber expensive as the real item.

Alas, the manual’s the same. It was the precautions booklet that had French. But I just noticed it has Spanish too…so it’s likely the same as the US one:(

Sorry for getting your hopes up(should have dug it out before commenting).

The sad thing is I can’t even say that there wouldn’t have been a French manual. I got the cart second hand and most anyone outside Quebec and New Brunswick’s Dieppe area would have just thrown the French side out.

Though if I were to guess, I’d say that there probably wouldn’t have been any French manual outside of Quebec since the game manual equality thing would have been in its early infancy at the time(early to mid PSX era was when it just started). I’ll ask around to see if anyone around here remembers anything to that effect. A guy runs a retro console store nearby who I know for a fact has come across a few VBs. He may know.

Some people may be willing to buy said cartridge.

At the very least, it’s a difficult-to-acquire rom dump with some neat kit attached to it.

I don’t see what’s indecent about that. And the guy may as well try to recoup -some- of his earnings.

The prices in Canada and the US for systems and game typically follow the exchange rate though with a small premium added(I’d say it probably cost about 30-40$ more even after exchange). That’s not to talk about taxes(at the time, the VB would have been taxed an additional 15%).

As for the French manual, Canadian language laws forced publishers to include French manuals in all games and systems at least for sale within Quebec and New Brunswick. Due to a lawsuit enacted by Quebec(I forgot if it was a private entity, a public group or a gov’t action), this became very much enforced. Mostly, companies just throw in the French version with all copies to make things easier.

I’m not sure whether the VB was released prior or after the legal action(it would have cut it close since I believe it was the lack of manual in PSX games that triggered the action). If it was after, then the manual was sold with all VBs. If before, then it would only have been included in Quebec or NB if legit.

If it means anything, the precautions booklet that came with Mario Clash that was bought in Canada(and not in Quebec or NB) has a french side, though it’s in the same book.

@Robert

You likely can still sell it. Just lower the price to within reasonable:P

Probably won’t break even. But hey, if you need money, something is better then nothing, no?

I’m sure there are people here who’d pay a (much)lower price for it. Depends really on if you really want to sell it.

Best of luck, in any case.

No worries. So long as the clamp stays steady(in other words, when you tight it using the flat black handle on the other side of the nut, it stops rotating) you’re fine.

The loose bolt poking out the other side is normal(though why they designed it that way is beyond me).

EDIT: Nope, sorry, just noticed the loose cylinder. Any way you can take a few more pics from different angles? Really hard to tell what’s going on there.

whether it was the design

Yes.

the games

yes

or the experience

sometimes yes

And lets not forget the price.

But hey, I enjoy it 🙂

Either way, sounds like it’d be a heckuva lot of fun to attend.

I tested the Flashboy app under Linux using Wine. Didn’t appear to do anything(not even mount a pseudo com port under the ~/.wine/dosdevices directory) so the Flashboy app didn’t read it as connected.

[realyst]

DanB: Now that you’ve discovered my secret, comrade, I must ‘dispose’ of you 😉

VUE:

I don’t support anything that violates someone’s trust. However, I don’t support greedy behavior. Maybe it’s the layered morality of this issue that makes it such a ‘hot button’.

Should the original ROM dumper have dumped the ROMs? Well, if there was a contract that he wouldn’t, he/she(it?) probably shouldn’t have.

Also, if he/she(it?) was their friend, then he/she(it?) probably put that friendship in jeopardy.

However, we have no reason to believe that the original proprietors would ever have released these. So I stand by my statement that, in the end, this was a good thing.

I also believe that the original proprietors are doing a massive disservice. With the exception of a Flashboy or some other, private, home grown solution(maybe the original WarioLand EEPROM hack), they would have needed an emulator to use these ROMs. The emulator authors are able to create those awesome applications because of community support. They need ROMs that utilize all the features of the emulated hardware, acquired one way or the other, to test them fully.

The MAME team, for example, takes donations for dumping arcade boards so they don’t die in the end as well as lobbie developers and rights holders to release the titles. They use this for both preservation as well as to aid in the development of the application.

By holding on to these so ‘tightly’, they are reaping the rewards of a larger community without actually giving back to it.

–Edit: I should rephrase that as “they are reaping the rewards of a larger community without actually giving back to it when they are easily able to without negative consequences” since many people enjoy that which the emulation community produces but have nothing with which to contribute.

While it is a sticky moral question when it comes to the original dump, I disagree with anyone who somehow justifies this protectionist act or chastises a member of this community who really thought he was doing a good thing(and to which I believe he did).

Is it their right? Of course it is. But I think we’ve all seen enough examples of something not being right, even though it (rightfully so) is a right.

If that makes me a commie, paint me red and Viva la Revolution! 😉

• This reply was modified 15 years, 9 months ago by realyst.

Unfortunately, the owners of the carts required the dumps to stay private to allow them to be dumped… so… were these people supposed to betray the owners and release them? Or say “nevermind… I just won’t dump them”.

So what good is it? The owners wanted the carts dumped for them so they wouldn’t release them?

How is that any better then NOT releasing them? If they were holding them that tightly to begin with, again I say they deserve no sympathy.

Your falling into some circular logic trap. A cart held on tightly and a ROM held on tightly are the same thing, only the container changes. Were these roms put in any public archive? Was there any level of redundancy that would have been better then widespread release?

Then the information was put at risk for no better reason then personal and illogical greed(because logical greed would at least mean there would be a financial benefit).

Quite frankly, the people causing the most harm are those, such as yourself, that are justifying this action in any way, feeding those with this strange mental affliction that makes them believe what they’re doing is anything but stupid and petty.

The ROMs are out, and we’re all that much better for it.