I have a Ghost Pilots AES Prototype, which is very real, I'm not sure what differences it has, though. XACROW won't speak to anyone. I know he also cares about Mega Drive unreleased prototypes, but even then he won't respond. EDIT, after doing some research and seeing how Xacrow original communications, it looks like it is a French collector posing as a Japanese collector, so it might be someone everyone already knows, which I don't understand why anyone would do that, but oh well.
I've sent his account a few emails, no response. Why anyone would hoard these games without testing the market is beyond me. Someone else has to have them... I mean, if the offer needs to be higher - I'll make an offer. Wonder if the screens are faked anyway?
Well, I have a great amount of unreleased protos for all sorts of cart systems and with as many as I've had dumped people still think I'm "hoarding" everything. There's a lot of ignorance out there and it's quite funny, but whatever. As far as these screens go, honestly, that's $50,000 or more in monies for unreleased games, so it's either a scam, or a collector who just does not want to part with them, but it's not a Japanese collector. The dude is using a French hosting site and his responses on the site were always in European tone "bye" for many English "goodbyes" and such. No one from Japan does that. To top that off, all his "sample" carts are normal Yahoo Japan auction winnings, nothing special, and he has pics of those, but not of the actual Neo carts. To each his own, if someone offered me stupid money for most of my unreleased stuff, it would be out there more. Money ALWAYS talks, but that whole thing with XACROW is a scam in my opinion. He "may" have the games, but it's a "lie" with who he is.
I'd agree that money is a big factor. I mean, if someone gobsmacked me with a load of cash, I wouldn't say no. I'd have to be bill gates before I would even consider turning down that much money.
Who knows. I see emu screens that could have been faked. I mean, he couldnt provide any info. Why post them?
Like I said, how does he have photos of his sample Mega Drive carts, but only screens of the Neo stuff? makes no sense.
None at all. Because he doesnt have any...? Not hard to get emu screens. Someone was telling me how it could have been done.
Couldn't he have dumped them himself and then took shots from an emu? Seems like the likely case. I doubt he actually made perfect replicas of the titles himself in photoshop or something. And in that case, surely he owns them, these aren't freely available roms or anything either.
Then explain why he says he is Japanese but hosts on a French site, has no pics of the actual carts, but pics of some standard crap Mega Drive stuff?
He's just being a prick by being secretive with pics of the carts for some reason... and he's pretending to be Japanese in order to get this stuff since he knows Japanese collectors would probably be assholes about doing business with foreigners. That's the way I see it anyway. Either way, I just don't see it being possible all those shots were faked.
As there is only one websute with FR2 listed as a proto, and even then it's a bit vague as it only mentions it could have been an AES / MVS cartridge, rather then saying 'Yes I have an original MVS proto...' is this basically a dump of the CD-ROM game to work on AES and MVS? It's a odd game to convert to MVS as it was released earlier in the year to as an arcade game, although a single board would run two machines for Vs play or 2 single player games... The arcade hardware is very similar to the Neo Geo hardware except for an additional Z80 and a higher screen resolution. So I can't see what the point of an MVS version would have been... i know that the mahjong games on the Neo Geo were some of the poorer selling games on the system, so I can see why there is no AES version.
The Xacrow screendumps always looked a bit suspicious to me. When these screendumps were first released, I was hoping that a lot more pictures would follow, but that didn't happen. If you look at the pictures you can see they have been recompressed at least once. The "Xacrow" text is sharp, without artifacts, but the actual emu/rgb capture image has lots of artifacts. The Bang Busters one looks like it was in GIF format before. It looks like Xacrow doesn't have the uncompressed originals. He didn't release any other screendumps, so it makes me think that he got these images from somebody else. That, or he is pretty lousy with editing images.
Well, I've seen plenty of times in my life where people doubt the credibility of pictures and then they go on about artifacts this and compression that, only for the picture to turn out to be real. You honestly can't know for sure, ever. And no one seems to be pointing out that besides the title screens, his site also shows a shot in-game for each. Sure, he's so talented that he made 100% perfect screenshots of these games, just to mess with people.....right. Whether he owns them or not, I think it's pointless to dispute the shots, they clearly came from real games. Since this guy isn't likely to ever give a damn about neo geo fans(of which I definitely am not, but this xacrow guys story interested me , I say you guys should just not give a damn about him. Unless you wanna pretend to be a Japanese collector and find him. You could probably get any info off of him that way Speaking of which, is there any way at all the contact him, or is his info nowhere to be seen now?
I think his Sega Mega Drive cassettes are not like that (standard crap). He has got quite common ones like the store samples, but I think some others are very rare. Not all are sample cassettes as you described them. I think not everybody takes pictures of all things they have got, so I think not taking pictures of the Neo Geo cassettes maybe does not really mean anything.
Juste, I think you are confused. The "sample" carts he has are store sample carts. He has PHOTOS of the carts, but no screens. Why? There's no point to having screenshots of released games but he took pics of the carts. He did not do the same for the Neo stuff, though. Now as far as Mega Drive "rarity" goes, my unreleased undumped protos are the equivalent of his to Neo Geo. If he wants crazy rares, I have them, if Japanese collectors want crazy undumped unreleased Mega Drive stuff, I have it, but rarely does anyone step up to the plate on those, and I can tell you, if he took PICS of the games for MEga Drive, but not Neo, he might only have ROMS of them, who knows...but it's something. The fact he is not Japanese and put together this elaborate hoax for nothing is just completely bizarre. Chalk it up to more crazy Neo Geo collecting behavior.
