Oh sorry been a busy week and this had slipped my mind. And yes, it’s the same list. I looked at Gigaleak 2 and 3 (4 depending on how you count things), I didn’t see anything beyond that list, which is rather unfortunate. After the lotcheck lists for NES and Gameboy came the actual lotcheck roms with many that had never been leaked before. So had there been anything on the VB list, like Dragon Hopper for example, it would be a safe bet that it eventually gets released as well. But sadly it seems doubtful that the rest of the yet to release leaks will have any new Virtual Boy roms.
Alright, woke up and wasn’t quite happy with em before. So I redid it a bit. Here’s my updated stuff.
Ah, well I can agree with you about the title of “prototype”, technically these are a developer cart rather than an actual prototype. But it’s the name that stuck, so in that sense, they are all refereed to as prototypes, the content certainly has a big impact, but it’s still a neat and rather uncommon item anyway.
I’ve heard of them selling a while back on yahoo auctions, but beyond that, I’ve only ever seen 3 of these for sale. The Virtual League Baseball one, which has an even more ridiculous price tag but it believed to be authentic, the copy of Panic Bomber (1 of 2 known and documented copies), and this one. I know of a 4th one that sold, but I believe it was a private sale, I never actually saw it for sale publicly. Even then, Virtual League Baseball might have never actually sold due to it’s price, though I haven’t seen it listed in a good bit now, prior to that it was listed for years. So even without something authentic flashed on it, it’s still neat as a generic BA3A cart. It still is a rather uncommon collection piece that’s missing from many really nice collections that I’ve seen due to it’s rarity.
I was looking over the images and the chips. The chips on this prototype are Texas Instruments, which seems rather odd for a Japanese cart. Looking up the chips, the data sheets are from 1997, however I’m unable to tell if that’s when production started or just when this revised data sheet was released. The date code I believe is YMLLLS. Which would mean a year of 5, and a month of 3. This could be 03/1995, which would put it around what it should be, however it could also be 03/2005 which would mean the chips came much too late. Looking at the listings images, I do notice one of the chips use to have a sticker on it, which was removed. That’s also not a good sign, while it’s possible it was like that going back to development, it’s also possible it was removed to erase the chips and flash the dump onto the cart.
I would recommend contacting “Benjamin Stevens”. He’s rather knowledgeable on the prototype carts. He may be able to help you with verifying the authenticity of the cart. Here’s his profile. https://www.planetvb.com/modules/usercenter/index.php?section=profile&uid=1643
I missed that another prototype went up for sale. If you don’t mind my asking, it looks like it listed at $2000, did you make an offer or did you pay the full asking price?
@pinmagic – The hole is for erasing the data. Shining light into the hole erases the chip so it can be rewritten with something new. It’s a rather old method.
Also, I was thinking this was one of the known prototypes, but I was mistaking it for Virtual Bowling. You should definitely do some research on this one for values sake. There were some blank prototype carts that came out a while back and people just wrote random dumps onto them. It’s history will highly impact it’s value. There are seven known EP-ROM carts out there that are easier to verify due to their public history. Faceball, Virtual Bowling, Space Pinball, Jack Bros, 2 Panic Bombers, and Virtual League Baseball for known EPROM carts. There is also a Bound High Flash cart. It would definitely be worth your time and effort to try and establish some authentic history behind this one, the easiest way would have been some difference in the ROM, but it seems there isn’t any unfortunately.