If I had to guess, I’d say that the Canadian importer made an unofficial French manual and inserted it in the vboys sold in Canada. In Spain, something similar happened with Top Gear 2 for the SNES: it was the British version, imported by a company which made a B/W manual and inserted it into the game prior to distributing it in the country. In fact, the back of the box had a sticker with Spanish text just on top of the English text.
As you can see in the pic, there’s no country code in the B/W manual (in the colour manual you see something like VUE USA or something like that).
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.
Well, I as an owner of the 4 ER carts, think that it’s better to have a backup ROM copy -even if it’s not in my hard drive- just in case the carts get corrupted after the years, than not having anything at all. I believe that dumping and releasing are two different concepts. If I agree to dump my games, it’s because I want to have a backup copy. If I agree to release them, it’s because I want everyone to have a copy of my games.
The point that DogP is trying to point out is the following:
1.- Someone (let’s call him Mr. X, because I can’t remember who he was, but you can check the forums) claims he has the 4 ER carts, and is going to dump them to release the ROMs because he wants everyone to have them.
2.- Mr. X, after several faulty dumps and problems with the ROM images, says he has finally achieved it and releases the ROMs which he supposedly obtained from his carts, claiming that he has dumped them.
3.- People who own the original 4 ER ROMs check the CRC32 of the ROMs (which if I’m not mistaken is unique to each archive) and discover that the released ROMs are not new dumps, but the original dumps made years ago from carts whose owners said “you can dump them, but you cannot release the ROMs to the public”.
Therefore, the problem is not that the ROMs were released, but the way they were released and the “breakage of the word given to the owners” that this person did in order to release the ROMs.
I once didn’t mind dumping my ER carts to release the ROMs, but never had the knowledge to do so. It’s all this “give the ROM to me for free because I deserve it” thing that has made me think twice about all these ROM releasing.
What everyone should understand with all this “release the ROMs” thingie is that the original owners of all these games which everyone wants to play have invested many, many hours of their personal life, as well as incredibly high amounts of money to get them, and they have the right to decide what to do with their games and who they want to allow to play with them.
If I were the one who got those games dumped, and agreed to release my dumped games, it’s because I wanted everyone to have access to them. And if it had been my decission, my reasons for not releasing them would have probably been the insane effort (both economical and time-consuming) I had to do to get them, as well as the “bad-souls” of some of the people whom I’ve known while trying to get those games and all the “I want the ROMs” I’ve read in the last years. Why should I release something for free that has made me spend years of my life to get them?
And if one of the people who owns the game agrees to have his games dumped “for the sake of preservation” with the only compromise of not seeing those ROMs distributed, I think that his desire should be respected, even if you don’t understand his reasons for it. And finally, if someone breaks the compromise and releases the ROMs (as it has happened with the 4 ER ROMs), what do you think the owner would do if he has more ER things? I’d bet that he would grab those ER things even more strongly so that it doesn’t happen the same as with his 4 ER ROMs. Don’t you think so? (and for God’s sake, please think about it from a reasonable point of view, not from the “I want all the ROMs” point of view).
Another bit of info: in Spain, a magazine called Hobby Consolas held a sort of Videogames Trivial in which you had to answer about 50 or 100 extremely difficult questions. With all the people who replied correctly, they held a draw, and the winner got one of those machines. And about the size, I do remember -as DogP says- that it was very big.In fact, it was fairly bigger than the average size of arcade machines those days.
Nice find.I remember seeing that Sega arcade when I was in Disney World in the mid 90’s.It was truly in 3d,very similar to the holograms you can see in science museums.I don’t remember too clearly,but I think the machine showed pre-recorded video in which you could do several things with the characters.What I do remember is I didn’t play because it was too expensive :-p
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
After some days without logging into vr32.de, I come back and find all this is happening… These are my points regarding the public availability of the ER ROMs:
1.- As far as I know, those dumps were private dumps which should have never been made public. As some of you know from my posts several years ago, I never minded if those ROMs were made publicly available, but if the original dumper said “please keep them private”, they should have been kept private…
2.- Seeing DogP’s job in his Mario Kart game, I can’t believe his ROM merger doesn’t work. This tool does something as simple as combining odd and even bytes in a single archive. For a skillful programmer, making a tool like this should be piece of cake (I will stand corrected, though). Therefore, I don’t think this tool doesn’t work…
3.- I don’t think the original dumper is very happy with this situation, and all of this only makes owner of private ROMs (prototypes, etc.) keep them even more private. It was said time ago in these same forums that the dumps were completely secure regarding their preservation. This means that there are already enough copies around so that the code doesn’t get lost, so there was no need to release them.
I guess most of you won’t agree with what I say, and think that these games should have been made public many years ago so that you could play them in your Flashboys and/or emulators, but in my opinion, if you give your word about something, you should keep it. If you betray your word (and therefore the people to whom you gave your word), you lose your respect, and without respect you’re nothing…
DogP wrote:
LOL, funny how they tried to tatter the labels to make the fake proto chips look real… and if it’s worth so much, they might want to take better care when they pry the chips out of the sockets (the bottom right pin on the second chip down is bent way out).
DogP
Apart from probably not being a real proto, but EPROM’s reprogrammed with a ROM image and labels printed in a laser printer, I also think the deal is too risky. These are my reasons:
1.- The seller has 100% positive feedback, yes, but always for low amounts of money (none of more than 100 euro.) I already had a bad experience with another seller who had this kind of feedback, so I don’t really trust it too much (I don’t know the seller, though.)
2.- PayPal protects only up to $200. I have seen auctions of videogames in which the buyer had a protection of up to $1,000 or even $2,000 in some cases (check http://pages.ebay.com/help/tp/paypal-protection.html) If I was protected for $2,000 and was interested in the item for the $3,500 it’s being sold (too expensive IMO) I would think about it, but a protection of only $200 is very low…
And of course, that point of the right pin of the second chip down being bent is kind of a “botched job”, which gives the idea that the seller hasn’t taken too much care of the chips.
Thanks for the reply KR155E, I didn’t know you had sold the Flashboys to shops. That will give more popularity to the Flashboy 😛 Xenon, as for the horizontal line you mention, there’s the “glitchy displays fix” published by DogP in his page, but since you say you’re as bad as me with electronics, I would leave the Virtual Boy as it is unless it breaks completely. Just try not to tamper too much with the IPD and focus adjustments so that the pieces move as less as possible 😉
Hi Xenon, thanks for the compliments. Unfortunately, I think that some of them will never be released online, sorry. Anyway, you have still got a good bunch of cool games to play in the flashboy. As for http://www.evolutiongames.es KR155E, has this shop got the exclusivity of distributing the Flashboy in Spain? I didn’t know it was sold out of PVB. I’m just being curious here too…
Hola desde España! 😀 Let’s keep the post in English, since you began in English. Who is the Spanish online retailer who says that has the exclusive distribution of flashboy in Spain? I’m just being curious…
If I had to choose, I’d stay with vector graphic games in the vboy. Sure, they’re much worse than sprite-based games, but the 3D effect/depth is much better IMO.
jojobean wrote:
maybe if we combined our money they would go for it.
its probably best to wait. i have a hunch that nintendo will be releasing some VB games on virtual console, and who knows, dragon hopper could be one of them.
I don’t think Nintendo will release anything related to the Virtual Boy. They don’t even mention the console in their official sales charts nor in the number of games developed for their systems. I guess they don’t want to know anything else about it. They are kind of ashamed of it (unfortunately for us…)
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.
I like it a lot, it’s very simple and things are found more easily than in the previous web. There’s an image in the “cartridge ROM transplant” section that doesn’t show. I think it’s a Wario Land cart image, but I’m not sure.
I also miss the old logo, I liked the look of the blue-red combination. Maybe you’re working on a new logo for the page? 🙂
Virtual Bowling is in fact, extremely rare. A boxed copy near mint condition would go for a lot of money in eBay. The point is finding somebody who wants to sell it, because they seem to be more scarce as time goes by. Also, there isn’t a fixed price for it, since prices go up and down very heavily with these games.
If I were you,I would keep the game until better times come.People are used to trading in US dollars,and the euro exchange rate is terrible now.Also,collectors usually look for complete games,so potential buyers of your cart are people who just want to play the game,not have it as a collector’s item.
That’s a great price! I hope you enjoy the game. Although it’s Space Invaders so there’s nothing uber-innovative in its gameplay, I think the 3D effect is greatly done, and it’s a game I really enjoy. Prices usually go down a bit in summer because people do other things instead of spending the day checking eBay 😛
