Zelda gb proto on eBay

It's usually the "I don't have the means to test it..." that (usually) gives the game away. I'm willing to bet someone's just paid a lot of money for a EUR copy of Zelda on a fancy cartridge.

In fact, for the money, you could just buy an eprom programmer and board and just make your own for a lot less.

Perhaps including some documentation from Nintendo Europe might have made it a more desirable prospect as there's no real provenance here, just an eBay listing saying "I got it from some guys who worked for Nintendo hotline in Europe." - that's hardly concrete proof of anything. I'm sure they do come from Nintendo but a few years down the line that won't mean much to someone trying to sell it on.

Anyone want to buy a copy of Chu Chu Rocket that was taken up into space by NASA? I've got a few of them lying around the house somewhere... bulk discounts available.

 

That seems highly likely anyway - if the claimed origin of this cart is true, then it's going to have to be identical to retail. There is simply no possible reason for the Nintendo hotline to have anything that ISN'T identical to the retail release, since their job is assisting customers who are playing the retail game.

 

I mean, it could have a debug mode so that they can hop around things.

 

Like they in say in business sales, the two important things are:

- You are not selling a product, you are selling a story that goes with a product
- ABC --> Always Be Closing

 

It can be true. I mean, if a customers says I have some troubles using a certain object in a certain region of the game. Hotline team should be able to access every region of the game fast, and use any items. So it is possible that they have debug options.

One question, is the eprom bigger (in data size) than a debug cart eprom ? A debug menu may involve a bigger Rom, so maybe a bigger eprom. Which can explain the "Frankensteined" cart ( thanks Bobo ).

But all this is suppositions. I just hope that the buyer will share some informations about the cart.

 

What a weighty argument....

Why are you 100% sure it is a fake ?

 

A lot of assumptions and theories. Bottom line is only a proper dump will tell.

My guess is that this was bought by a hardcore Zelda fan. In other words, the story behind it is more important than the item itself. It will probably be displayed on a shelf and never touched. To each their own.

Regardless of the fact that it is real or fake, the seller fulfilled the main objective: selling it and making $.

 

Don't think so, the pic shows an M27C4001 (4mbit/512KB), retail ROM is 512KB.

 

Hi all! Just registered after having this thread pointed out to me by a French collector. The Zelda GB proto listing in question was mine, and I'd be happy to answer any questions you may have to (at least try to) clear things up. I'm awaiting feedback from the buyer, and will definitely contact him to hear if he wants to come forward to dump the ROM.

As pointed out by Bobo, this cart was part of a bigger collection of prototype/sample carts for GB, NES, SNES and N64, and I posted photos of them over at NintendoAge a while back. I don't know much about protos in general, but I'm 100 % sure that the background story checks out - I have proof of the previous owners being hired for the hotline job, and their names and phone number are mentioned several times in the official Nintendo magazine we had in Norway in the 1990s.

The wording in my listings were hands-down completely honest, chosen with care and no intentions of foul play. Some of the carts were labeled with words and remarks like "final", "sample", "V. 1.1" and the like, and some were not. I was merely stating what I actually knew. Me saying that I didn't have the means to compare them to final/retail versions was just that, as I don't have access to the required tools for checking/dumping ROMs or time to play through them all.

I don't see how this cart is much different from photos of other GB dev carts being posted in this thread? The main photo in my listing was showing the cart with the front of the shell removed. I later added a photo of the cart fully assembled.

I think you might be onto something, but I don't believe this to be the case for all of the protos I sold on eBay, as there are things that point in the opposite direction as well. I've been helping in the sales of this collection since around April this year, and it included hundreds of games in total for different Nintendo systems. All of these were regular retail copies meant for the brothers to play to be able to help people calling the hotline.

However, I don't think it's reasonable to be too hung-up on the hotline part when it comes to the prototypes. I simply provided that info to "back up" the story of how they would have access to this amount of protos, showing that they worked with the company distributing Nintendo games in Norway. I think it's important to remember that some of the protos were games not even released in Europe (Speedy Gonzales and the SFC exclusive F1 Grand Prix, for example). While some of the protos/samples I listed were clearly final (or close to final), these other bits of info leads me to think that what they've told me is definitely plausible: some of the prototypes were given to them so they could give feedback to the developers. That being said, it's reasonable to believe that most of them or all were late versions.

I've been trying to dig up some of the spreadsheets they were talking about, but haven't had any luck yet.

 

What people have been pointing out is that this Zelda proto does not come on an official development PCB but rather on a modified retail PCB.

 

You said it "most important titles". This mean probably bigger games, which probably mean more data. So it can be possible that the eprom on original flash card was too small to contain game datas during development process so they used to "hijack" their own cards. Also, the flash cards were maybe not totally finished at that time. I mean, are we sure that flashcards has been used at the beginning of gameboy development era ? We have not idea. So in my opinion, everything is possible when it comes to prototypes. All of this are suppositions, and nobody can say that it is 100% fake or true unless he has worked on the project.

 

Thanks for your feedback.

 

I got the Speedy Gonzales prototype, it is 100% legit.

 

Gameboy came out in 89' and Zelda didn't come around until '93. So are you saying in 4 years Nintendo couldn't produce EPROM development PCBs? Bigger games or important titles? Which is it? What could be more important than a 1st party franchise like Zelda? As for data size, the game is 4 megabits. By 1993 this also wasn't really "big". Also these are not "flash cards". These are development boards that take industry standard EPROMs. It's as certain as can be that these were available at the beginning of the Gameboy era. Gameboy wasn't Nintendo's first system. The Famicom and NES were long established. They had similar boards. So did the SFC/SNES which also pre-date Zelda on Gameboy.

Maybe it's a "sample" from somewhere, but certainly not Nintendo of Japan and I wouldn't think Nintendo of America either.

 

There is a misunderstanding here. I am actually talking about bigger games, I didn't say "bigger than zelda". So I was including Zelda in the lot.

I tough it was a modified flashcard, sorry for my misunderstanding. I was indeed saying that (in the case it was a flashcard) Nintendo was probably using PCBs development cart (like the ones sent to journalists for review) in the early years of the gameboy era, because flashcards came probably later in the gameboy life. But now that I understand the it is not a flashcard, this argument doesn't stand anymore.

I think we will not be able to more about this cart unless the buyer releases some informations about it.

 

You saying that just makes me even *more* suspicious. You honestly can't see the difference between a cleanly made, manufactured PCB and one that's got a piece of freakin' vero board and IDE cable soldered on it?

I could give you the benefit of the doubt *if* you hadn't seen the internals of a 'real' dev cart, but you took *close up pictures* of the other cart PCBs.

In case it 'slipped your memory', this is what the other carts looked like when you took a picture of it, can you spot the difference?


Something don't smell right here....

 

Holy shit the final build jumped up.

 

Hm?