Would you organize these together?

[fcgamer | 5,019]

So I've been doing some work in my game closet, and have been trying to reorganize some of my bootleg games. Years ago I would just organize them by release year of the game. Now I decided to start collecting bootlegs by different "key" shell designs, and thus I'm left trying to decide if it would be better to group all the bootleg Pac-Man cartridges together, or to just group different carts by shell design.

But then what to do in a situation like this?

So we know that the Pac Man with ST was made by Sing Tane. The other two cartridges, although being similar in design, carry the marks "P P" and "B B", which may be Sane Ting or some other company entirely. So should I put these cartridges in the same bin as the Sane Ting ones? Keep them out? Suppose I only have fifteen Sane Ting carts but a bin holds forty, use the extra space for the so-called imposters or not? 

How would you group them? The same can be said for ntdec shells, assupo shells, etc. Let's discuss.

[Ankos | 559]

I would always sort by company, then game or shell design. If I wasn't sure on which company made it though then I'd be down to guess, so I would probably group these

My logic is that a bunch of different companies could make carts for one game, but would I rather make a set of Pacman carts or a set of Whirlwind Manu carts. In my head it makes more sense to go for the Whirlwind Manu set. I also would give shell design lower priority since a single company can use multiple shell designs

Here's a Whirlwind Manu cart I saw online in a Micro Genius shell not that long ago, not something they'd normally use

It's a nice shell, but I wouldn't break up the Whirlwind Manu carts over it (if I collected Whirlwind Manu carts that is, which I don't currently)

Edited August 17 by Ankos

[T-Pac | 8,072]

I want to say "just alphabetize my title", but I can see how that might be tricky with bootlegs because of all the "X-in-1" games that don't have a specific name otherwise.

[T-Pac]

[fcgamer | 5,019]

7 minutes ago, T-Pac said:

I want to say "just alphabetize my title", but I can see how that might be tricky with bootlegs because of all the "X-in-1" games that don't have a specific name otherwise.

[T-Pac]

For years I would just alphabetize my games, even the licensed Japanese stuff, but after awhile it just didn't make sense. For example, instead of looking for Castlevania III you'd be searching for Akumajou Densetsu. So it was really weird, especially if family came over and wanted to play something.

I've found that categorizing by year is a much more meaningful solution, at least for my needs. It offers context to the games, and it is also generally quite easy to have a rough idea where something might be, even if you aren't 100% sure.

I guess with these cartridges is that (at least amongst bootleg collectors) some shells are linked to certain manufacturers, thus giving them a bit of a prestige / demand over something that is generic from an unknown maker. As a result, it's easy to start collecting cartridges from different companies, even if you already have the game. So if we both had our own line of cartridges, then someone might choose to collect T-Pac cartridges as well as fcgamer cartridges. Of course though it is impossible to find every game in every cartridge style (as likely not all companies published every game), so one might end up with a small handful of T-Pac carts, a small handful of generics, a small handful of fcgamer carts, etc. So then do you categorize the special shells / series separately, or do you throw everything together grouped by game (either by year or date or whatever) and when you get to something like Pac-Man, you end up having five copies, all from different makers, in a row?

It's really a complex situation, and I haven't really found a good solution aside from separating everything and at the same time collecting all shell designs by all makers, but that is just nuts and is a rabbit hole that I am not particularly interested in diving down.

[fcgamer | 5,019]

On 8/18/2024 at 12:50 AM, Ankos said:

I would always sort by company, then game or shell design. If I wasn't sure on which company made it though then I'd be down to guess, so I would probably group these

My logic is that a bunch of different companies could make carts for one game, but would I rather make a set of Pacman carts or a set of Whirlwind Manu carts. In my head it makes more sense to go for the Whirlwind Manu set. I also would give shell design lower priority since a single company can use multiple shell designs

Here's a Whirlwind Manu cart I saw online in a Micro Genius shell not that long ago, not something they'd normally use

It's a nice shell, but I wouldn't break up the Whirlwind Manu carts over it (if I collected Whirlwind Manu carts that is, which I don't currently)

Yes, I agree and would do the same; however, for me, the classification of FDS conversions trumps Whirlwind Manu status, so my Whirlwind Manu set is missing all of the FDS ports, which are stored separately.

In a similar way, my JY cartridge collection has the multicarts stored differently than the single carts, which are all then stored by developer / publisher.

Ahh, what a nightmare to sort this stuff.