Reflashing N64 prototype Roms- right or wrong?

i posted this on NA but I thought I'd make one here too. Sorry admins if this isn't the right place for this.

Doing my usual trawling of the web for any prototype information and I hit an old thread here about the Zelda Oot master quest debug from last year and there was a lot of talk about it being fake. Now a well respected member of the n64 community stated his distrust in the prototype and claimed and I quote

"Some people use gangwriter with beta/unreleased game rom that can be found on the web and resells "outstanding" protos.I heard many bad stories about them and I am afraid it won't be the first or the last one."

I've scoured the web to find evidence of this but I haven't first hand seen anything about this ever happening.

Now that is the criminal side of reflashing. Then I got thinking, if you had a prototype cart that was damaged but the Rom was intact would it be morally wrong to dump then reflash it onto another cart? If you bought a prototype Rom then flashed it onto a blank cart would that seem less desirable than the actual cart that was flashed by the developers? I'd love to hear your opinions.

 

I can't think of more than 5-6 people who have the equipment to do this.

The inside of a nintendo flash cart isn't a bunch of eproms any fool can whack into a programmer.

 

I am well aware that it's no easy feat, this is pretty much purely theoretical but I have had someone ask me to source out someone to upload a Rom onto a blank dev cart. I think it's very shakey ground I don't like the idea of this happening seeming though n64 prototypes are my main collection item. I'd hate to think that anything in my collection has been reflashed by anyone but the developers.

 

I don't think it wouldn't be morally wrong, if the seller disclosed that it was a reproduction made with original parts. I suspect it would have a significant impact on the value. Collector's typically value reproductions of any kind at far less than a bonifide original.

 

If you're honest about it, it wouldn't matter.

Doing this to sell for big bucks while keeping your mouth shut is morally wrong.

 

The big word here is "if".
I'd be worried that any prototype I'd buy could have been tampered with, if it was publicly know that people were doing this for genuine reasons it still has the possibility of undermining all faith in N64 prototypes. Heck even now if anything amazing comes up like the oot debug everyone is claiming fake.

 

If there's will, there's a way. It happens with a lot of rare items, there's a want to clone and duplicate for more money. Not everyone is good hearted.

There's always a genuine reason to backup prototypes though, never know when you might get a flood, or house fire.

 

You cant be sure. But as kev say, the hardware to write to a n64 flash cart is awesome rare. Even when you find a gangwriter you also need that interface card. Its not the ODEM from the GC, cant remember the name right now.. Was it the Wif card?
After all the years i only see one for sale. And i dont think any person own such hardware will use it to make money.

 

I'm pretty sure you can flash those carts using a Partner 64 setup and the NUS DCC dual cartridge card. I have no idea if it was officially supported, but I remember seeing it being done back in the day. Having said that, finding the DCC might be a bit of a challenge since it's just a couple of bare boards with no box, and exactly the sort of thing that would be thrown away as being junk.

 

Again, you still need the Partner64 setup. It's not as terrifyingly rare, but it's not like it's super common either. Very well could work though. 512Mbit flashcarts are very uncommon anyway. Anyone with that kind of setup, selling reflashed protos, out of necessity would need to be selling other smaller sized carts in greater numbers. Plus, if you want to get anal about it a poke through the code can sometimes reveal if it was designed for a certain devkit.

I seriously doubt those particular ROMs are frauds. Nintendo of Europe is probably outsourcing translation work or just radically less stringent with security. The GC rereleases of OoT were all N64 ROMs, built using their old setup so we can only assume flashcarts were provided at some point. Unlike the Wii re-releases they embedded new resources in and there are significant code differences.

There hasn't been any evidence to support that an evil gangwriter mafia exists. That's probably just the ravings of a lunatic.

 

Yeah I've noticed when something like the oot debug came out there was so many people saying how easy it is to duplicate these and ripping people off with high profile prototypes. If this was the case wouldn't there be a lot less one off prototypes. There are really only a handful of high profile prototypes on the n64.

 

N64 is a different beast than other consoles where it is much easier. Weve had a member here sell Dreamcast GD-Rom copies, so it isn't unheard of for someone to sell legitimate-looking prototypes, and I think that is where the concern comes from. But if someone really want to be a scammer, the investment in something like a gangwriter is probably less than if they sold a Zelda prototype.

 

well tbh, backing up a prototype is a different subject than restoring a backup to more carts, backing up simply makes sure the original code is never lost, but making a duplicate is less of a necessity and imo can only lead to confusion and mistrust for people looking to buy 1 off original carts and paying one off prices and it turns out that the seller is just duplicating them and selling the duplicates, which undermines the trust involved in these kinds of things....for example i wouldn't mind knowing that say a digital picture was taken of a work of art so others could appreciate it, but if i was a art collector and discovered that the art i was looking to buy had been virtually indistinguishably duplicated and has the potential to continually be duplicated and sold as the original with no way of people truly knowing which one is the true original it greatly damages the works value....backup for preservation fine, duplication into a near perfect or actually 100% perfect copy, not so much

if anyone genuinely wanted to make a personal backup to play and keep the original cart safe then something like a everdrive should suffice and then it will never be mistaken as genuine original beta

 

Actually they have to be backed up. EEPROM has a limited lifespan before the data stored on it becomes volatile.
We've already seen this happen with Mini Racers, where sectors of data were lost.

Reflashing N64 carts is, to say the least, nontrivial. It would be vastly less expensive to build new hardware and stuff it into a longcart look-alike than to manage to collect everything necessary to reflash an existing proto, assuming you have some large enough for the titles you're looking to do. Most of the high-profile titles are larger.

Plus, if you're going for more money it's going to have to be a non-retail build or something that can pass as one. There's a small number of N64 hackers that can do that kind of work, and a smaller number that can pass their work by other REs without setting off red flags. One seriously questionable ROM and your business is basically dead.

 

Can you shed some more light on this? I was under the impression that EEPROM has no volatility to it unlike EPROM and bit rot.

 

Many people have waited 10+ years to get a card for the gangflash. I won't sell the few I have because I know what people will do.
They will make $40,000 "protos" sealed in VGA cases and some fool will pay 40k for a reflashed superman cart.

 

That's a fantastic reason never to buy a prototype that's VGA sealed, well that and it's a stupid idea in the first place, I can't understand the logic behind it.

 

The only legit reason I can think of to reflash a piece of hardware would be to rewrite out the original dump to negate bit rot.

Also VGA graded games are stupid. Nobody worth a damn takes them seriously and wrapping up a sealed game with a battery that CAN and WILL leak causing damage to your "investment" is a really bad idea. When people store cars for long term collections they do various things to the fluids and the car as a whole.

Sealed games (with batteries) are just a time bomb. Period.

 

In fact, the storage mechanisms of EPROM and flash EEPROM are very similar - they both store data as charge on a floating gate. Those mid '90s flashes typically quoted a 10 year data retention, but this was mostly just engineers being paranoid and using the "what's the period of time you can prove you won't lose data even under worse case conditions" metric and in practice they should work much longer. How much longer? I don't know - 20 years is probably safe, but I would be amazed if any flash memory from the '90s is readable in 2040.

 

Which card are you guys referring to? The GangWriter has a SCSI interface. While the GangWriter did have an option for a proprietary Intelligent-Systems brand SCSI adapter, it says in the GangWriter manual that any 'off the shelf' PCI or ISA SCSI adapter will work just fine. Perhaps I misunderstood, but I believe that all you need is the GangWriter itself and the software to flash proto carts.