Do prototype games deserve to be preserved and played by everyone, or encased forever in plastic on a shelf as a reselling investment?

Do prototype games deserve to be preserved and played by everyone, or encased forever in plastic on a shelf as a reselling investment?

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  1. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Dump the cart, preserve the plastic. There's still value in having the actual cart

  2. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    they belong in a landfill, nobody cares about that old crap

  3. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    prototypes are literal unfinished games

  4. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >Do prototype games deserve to be preserved and played by everyone
    Ideally yeah, but companies will always try to keep them secret for one reason or another, which is understandable to a degree. After a certain amount of time it begins to not matter, but by that point they likely aren't preserved well by the company anyways and are in the hands of people who own them for value instead of history.

    Most people who keep them for value are against dumping them because it will devalue a thing they own. Which is ironic because once they become unplayable from bit rot nobody gets anything. Most of the time these don't have anything interesting on them minus a couple slightly altered sprites, it's rare there is anything crazy and unseen on these.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >bit rot
      Is that actually a real thing or is it just some Ganker meme like disc rot

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        No idea, but the basic survival of MOSFET (tiny transistors that make up any integrated circuit) is about 80-100 years before the gates corrode from oxidation so unless you're sealing these things in argon there is a defined expiry date on basically every single electronic item made after like 1960.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          2040 will be really interesting

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Is this a proven thing or a theory. Because I seriously doubt my NES cartridges are gonna stop working when i'm 70.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            >proven thing
            No anon, it's a guess because we haven't actually hit that time limit to see such in the wild. My source is the compsci professor at Durham I asked once when doing my dissertation of historiology and the digital age and he based it on something he did about 10 years before that with observing MOSFET degredation during normal use via the cool electronic microscope they'd just got.
            If it's any comfort, he said it frankly doesn't matter since a 80+ year old IC is likely to have other problems before gates oxidise, but I asked him for a hard limit on the age of a single piece of tech. Mostly for stuff like "could we keep a digital vault in perpetuity underground"? He was skeptical beyond a small black-box style device in a controlled atmosphere not linked to anything.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          I'm not too worried about surface mounted components honestly. More places are offering cheap recap services than ever before. I got an HDMI mod for my Dreamcast and he offered a full recap for an extra $15 and I went for it. Ever since then I started learning. I even fixed my GC disc drive because it turns out it wasn't the laser that was bad just failing caps.

          I get not everyone is gonna be down to learn or get that done, but at least in terms of things like caps and transistors we'll be a okay a bit longer than that. People literally make new GameBoy color boards you can just transfer all of your OEM chips over to. Once they're old enough to die I'm sure people will just make their own.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >corrode from oxidation so unless you're sealing these things in argon
          you fricking nincompoop they are sealed, in epoxy and resin and everything else that they coat the bare fricking silicon in to preserve it. Have you ever seen any piece of circuitry with bare silicon just out there in the world?

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        It's 100% a real thing. Most carts will outlive us, but prototypes that have exposed PCBs and might not have been always kept on a room temperature shelf since they've been made can 100% get it. Plus stuff like OP has had more time to get bad because the NES is 40 years old this year.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Even solid state storage is subject to literal cosmic radiation flipping a bit and corrupting a file. It's exceedingly rare but the the likelihood goes up with time. Nothing is safe.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        yes, it's real, and disc rot isn't a meme, either. take care of your shit.

  5. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >as a reselling investment?
    lol lmao

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      There is NOTHING FUNNY about the potential value of video games...some people LIVE off of grading video games.

  6. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    they deserve my fecal matter on them

  7. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Both.
    The ROM needs to be dumped and sent to the internet for digital preservation but the physical media needs to be preserved as well.

  8. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Unless the developers released it publicly, it's neither.

    The developers still have the right to control what happens to their creation. ALWAYS. Please respect that.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      No.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Absolutely not.
      This desire for total and perpetual control over creative products is NOT a natural urge.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      First they don't, they sold the game to the publisher and the publisher can do the frick they want with it, and more often than not they frick with the shit hard and ruin the original vision of the author or just kill the thing.

      Second go frick yourself, no one has the right to just erase media from existence.

  9. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >1990 build date
    That's already long after the original Japanese release, there wouldn't be anything interesting aside from maybe some of the translated text being slightly different.

  10. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    i believe that all collectors should have their houses broken into and stolen from.

  11. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    ROM chips degrade, if those carts don't get dumped eventually all the data will be lost

  12. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I didn't know about this grading scam until that RLM video. Do people seriously pay for this?

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Yes, expecting some sucker to pay more for it later.
      But then you run out of suckers, and shit collapse

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvLFEh7V18A
        Karl Jobst has a bunch of great videos on it.

        A highlight of his research is one of the guys who owns an online auction house and is involved with WATA was convicted of fraud in the 80s for price manipulation on collectible coins via dodgy gradings for his mates. Which is literally what is happening right now lmao.

        These guys are always finding new ways to overpay for old shit. Wouldn't surprise me if this was an elaborate money laundering scheme.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Karl Jobst has a bunch of great videos on it.

      A highlight of his research is one of the guys who owns an online auction house and is involved with WATA was convicted of fraud in the 80s for price manipulation on collectible coins via dodgy gradings for his mates. Which is literally what is happening right now lmao.

  13. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    At the end of the day that's decision of whoever buys it
    to complain or cry about it, is a waste of time

  14. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    They are 100% absolutely not worth preserving. There are legit classics nobody can play legally like panzer dragoon saga, but these preservation idiots are hard at work trying to get companies to give up their prototype/alpha code that is completely and utterly useless to the entire world.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >completely and utterly useless to the entire world.
      You're a genuine idiot if you really think this

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >There are legit classics nobody can play legally like panzer dragoon saga, but these preservation idiots are hard at work trying to get companies to give up their prototype/alpha code that is completely and utterly useless to the entire world.
      How will them not doing preservation shit (no matter how useless sometimes) somehow make games like Panzer Dragoon Saga that are stuck on old consoles playable again?? Those two things have absolutely nothing to do with each other. SEGA is a Yakuza, Sonic, Puyo Puyo, and Football manager company. People trying to get old source code from them is not stopping them from releasing that obscure JRPG you like on modern consoles.

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