Zelda gb proto on eBay

Way to go twisting my words to your own liking. Someone pointed out the difference between the Zelda -cart- and other dev -carts-, which I understood as the cartridges itself, not the actual PCBs. I can obviously tell the cosmetic differences between the boards, but apart from that I know nothing about protos in general, hence my question to get it clarified...

Still, you may doubt me (or the Zelda cart) all you want - I know my source is trustable, but convincing you might be impossible unless the buyer comes forward.

I have nothing new to add to the discussion yet, apart from a mention on Facebook about another proto with similar vero board a while back (R-Type, if I remember correctly). Is that not something any of you have seen before? Again, I'm asking out of curiousity, not to "build my defence" in any way.

 

Not to comment on legitimacy, but the vast majority of GameBoy prototypes that show up for sale come on actual development boards and not modified retail boards. Off the top of my head I can't recall having seen another such GB prototype.

 

The problem is, the buyer trusted you to an extent that this was legit. You yourself admit you don't know much about prototypes, so maybe you weren't the best person to be selling such things.

Even a layman would notice that this prototype was radically different to the other prototypes in your auctions, which is suspicious considering if it were real, it would be worth vastly more than the other ones.

 

Sonny_Jim: You've obviously concluded that the cart is fake, so I won't bother making an effort to convince you otherwise. However, some of the things you write don't make sense to me at all. Let it be clear that I don't have any problems with sound arguments and input about the cart itself, but I don't see what good comes out of you (and some others) pointing fingers and questioning my motives the way you do.

I also don't see why you keep arguing about something I've agreed to all along - that the board is different to the others I sold. I misinterpreted a statement from someone else, and pointed out that the shells were identical, nothing more.

And seriously, if you came across a piece you knew nothing about apart from its provenance and potential high value, would you leave it for someone else to find because you simply "weren't the best person to be selling such a thing"? Nonsense. I listed the cart with a starting price of $0.99 and no reserve, and the open market decided the final price. I had no reason to doubt its authenticity, thus marketing it as such. If it for some reason turned out to be fake, I would've had no problem refunding the full amount upon return. I really don't see the problem here.

I want to point out (again) that the collection I recently sold consisted of roughly 30 other prototypes as well, none of which have been questioned in terms of legitimacy. And Zelda wasn't the only one going for a pretty penny (the two Turtles games for NES were also rather expensive). If the owners actually had the equipment to make "fakes", why just make one? I can assure you money isn't an issue here. I've been helping out with the sales of this collection since April, and the price of Zelda is merely a drop in the ocean.

 

You mean this one? Doesn't look like vero board to me:

Could you please elaborate on the points that I've made that don't make sense to you?

I'm not so much questioning your motives, I think you have been fooled into thinking that this cart is something it isn't. I'm 'pointing the finger at you' because you were the seller of the item. If the two Nintendo hotline employees had sold this item, I would be asking them the very same questions I'm asking you.

I wouldn't necessarily leave it behind, but I would do a bit of investigation before putting my name to it. For example, if I found a classic car in a barn, had no idea of it was legit or not, then I would be in contact with someone who *did* know about such things, before going off trying to sell it as rare, one of kind etc etc.

I hope you are willing to stand behind these words, because if I were the buyer I'd be very nervous indeed.

This is the first time I can find in this thread that you actually admit that this cart is radically different to the other GB carts being sold.

If I were a drug dealer, had 20 pills of MDMA, one of which turned out to be Aspirin, that pill would still be Aspirin. No amount of 'Well, the other 19 pills were legit' changes the fact that it's Aspirin.

Who knows? Maybe they were duped by someone else? Maybe they were unimpressed with the prices they were getting for the other GB protos and decided to up the ante? Maybe they thought they could slip in this obviously hacked up retail board in the hopes that someone would think that, due to the other legit looking carts in the auction, it may actually be real?

FWIW, it's trivial to make a cart like this, I've made several myself. You need a plain old soldering iron, you don't need expensive surface mount equipment. You don't even need EPROM burning equipment, you can just buy them preprogrammed from someone for less that $20. The instructions on how to do so are available are all over the web:
http://www.digital-circuitry.com/DO...GAMEBOY_Classic_Flash_Cartridge_UPDATED_2.pdf

If you are 100% sure that this cart is legit, why are you trying to 'change my mind'?

 

It might help to see the manufacturing date of the EPROM. At this point, though, it is pretty much just guessing since we probably won't ever hear anything more about it save for the very slim chance that the buyer actually comes forward.

 

With better pictures of the board, you should be able to work out the manufacturing date. IIRC you might even be able to work out what retail game it was before it got hacked up.

But you're right, I don't think the buyer is going to come forward. They've spent a lot of money on this, so it'll be in their best interest for them to remain behind the scenes.

 

Maybe the buyer is just happy with the object itself and doesn't really care about content? I know collectors who buy things to have the "physical" item in the collection, nothing more nothing less.

 

I could buy that outcome if it weren't for the high ending bid. If this turned out to just be a repro of the final game, the buyer could be very upset. Even if someone wanted to collect odd pieces as a curio, $1k+ is excessive.

 

Heh, I used to have that Operation C.

 

At least, @jossan came here to talk about this cart. He could have stayed in the dark, as people with bad intentions could have done. I trust him when he says that the cart comes from a Nintendo hotline. The only mistake he has done was to list it as a prototype. Today, everyone is talking about prototypes, but we should be more precise in the definition of a prototype. For me, a prototype is a work in progress game (early build, close to final,....). We can also include Submission cartridges as they are a part of the development process.

The Zelda cart is strange enought to avoid talking about prototype. If the buyer bought it as a cart comming from an official Nintendo office, then he has what he was looking for (something odd and rare from Nintendo). It can be a self made cart, made by someone working in the hotline, in order to be able to answer more people at a time, without asking to the main european or japanese office to get a cart thought official ways (official ways are sometimes very long, like in all other companies in the world, including mine ). Who knows....

So the cart should have been sold as a cart comming from an official Nintendo office, but not as a prototype. But I think than Jossan was not looking to fool people. I have a perfect dark "prototype" on N64 (and I had a Mario Kart one) with Titus written on it. This is clear enought to prove that it is not an official prototype (the cart has probably been flashed by a Titus developper in order to play these games for free on the real hardware). But we can't be this sure with the Zelda proto, so we should just wait and hope to get more informations on it, and we should definelty not fight each other.

 

To some people, this is a legit prototype:



At first glance, it appears to be a retail Earthbound board. And indeed, it pretty much is, except that the ROM chip has been hand soldered on. A number of these boards exist, and were used by Nintendo of Europe for evaluation. They have been found in many places, and have a history to back them up.

I don't know why some people in this thread think they are the prototype police. Jossan's Link's Awakening cart may not be a conventional looking prototype, but since it came from a source involved in evaluation of Nintendo games, there is no reason to doubt its legitimacy. I've looked at well over 1000 prototypes over the years, and sometimes they aren't on a standard prototype board. I've also seen prototype boards with games that have obviously been burned on by someone who just wanted to play a game they downloaded off a BBS. Being able to recognize that just takes experience.

 

When you've got the Assembler of AssemblerGames himself casting doubt, then I think there is reason to doubt it's legitimacy.
To outline my reasons why I personally don't think this is a legit Nintendo prototype:

1. 1st Party Nintendo prototypes don't tend to leak
2. Nintendo had ample access to other, less hacked together prototypes to send to the hotline

Have you ever seen a 1st party Nintendo prototype that used a hacked up retail cart and vero board? I can imagine a smaller studio throwing something together to send to a magazine for a review, but not Nintendo.

 

With no disrespect, asssembler is not an expert on a lot of stuff that comes up on this forum. So I find this reasoning to be extremely flawed. Arguably badinsults has far more experience in this area.

Its not impossible someone tech savvy that worked on the hotline just made some replacement carts. At the job I currently do, I have done many work arounds just to get things working that were never done here before...

It only takes someone like the users of assemblergames to work there and something like this could happen. Maybe it wasnt shipped to them from Nintendo - they were short a cart and someone said "I can knock some up for temp usage" and a manager said to do it, so shit gets done. Stuff like this happens in business.

 

Yes, exactly ! As I said, official ways to get things internally is sometimes a pain, this is why we sometimes use other unofficial ways in everyday business. I guess it is the same in Nintendo offices or sub-officies.

Nintendo prototypes indeed don't leak often, but as I said, we should avoid to call it a prototype, as it is probably somethign else.

So true ! And even expects in a particular domain can't claim to own the truth.

Anyway, even if the welds are not perfect, the job done on this cart is pretty clever. Using this "Ribbon cable" (sorry, I don't know the word in English) was a good idea to avoid loose wires.

 

Yes, this was especially true during the NES era. Just look up the Dragon Warrior prototype, for example.