Lincoln

that's very helpful, thanks for putting that together. would not have thought to check yahoo sold.

any idea what this is worth? all i can figure about it is that it's seemingly rare, and maybe worth something. 

finally getting around to logging my sega cd stuff. found this archived page with some variant info including pictures of the lunar tss discs.

https://web.archive.org/web/20161015103403/http://www.jammaparts.com:80/sega-cd_gameboxvariants.htm

Ha, $20 for ogre battle and soccer. What a time.

I see last stop on there a bunch, that was the golden era where everything was online and still massively underpriced. Last couple years have been very disappointing, they are now selling bootlegs and everything collectible is absurdly priced.

I pulled a bunch nes and snes titles out of a local shop before people really caught on, Bubble bobble 2 probably the most notable.

Rarest would be the snes MKII nfr cart from a pawn shop, for $2 i think.

Put the lot of them on ebay as not working and for parts/repair, watch people pay full price for them anyway. 

6 hours ago, Gulag Joe said:

I heard about a guy who sent a left bros and it came back right bros

Is this a serious comment? Whats the story?

With blade runner there are several cuts and iirc the ultimate cut is considered by far the best. Its a slow movie for sure but im glad i spent the time to watch it.

For me its the godfather. I tried to watch it once a couple years ago but lost interest at some point. I just don't think i was in the right frame of mind for it at the time.

I won this, going to pick it up saturday. I have no idea if this was a good deal or not but I feel ok with it given the controller and box are included. I tried pricing against ebay but most of the modules i could find are megadrive units. guess i need to find a laseractive now

Hmm, i may have to look into this. LD bug bit me lately. These are basically guaranteed to need a cap job at this point right?

Some part of this is going to require low level communication with the device thats not going to be in a standard library and will be hard to write in a portable fashion. Choice of language is mostly irrelevant to this.

Idk how long that software has been around but .net is no worse a choice than any of those other languages now that the core libraries are officially available for Unix environments. In fact I'd say the baked in UI support puts it ahead of c or c++ for development ease. Does python have standard UI libraries? I would decline to buy anything that required a java app to operate.

2 hours ago, Code Monkey said:

This one? Their software is a .msi file, why would someone write a proprietary Windows program for an operating system independent piece of hardware? That doesn't make any sense, you're just reading files, why isn't it in an independent language?

http://keeelectronics.com/WillemPro.html

you seem to have a misunderstanding of several things packed into this post but the short of it is you need an executable to interact with the programmer, executables are OS-dependent, and windows is by far the most popular OS. there likely isn't enough of a demand for them to bother with software for other OS.

I have a coleco gemini and like it over the atari versions. Smaller, switches and ports are in better positions. Controllers are better too. RF is decent in it. I'd like to get a composite video mod but i don't know what's available for it. 

Apple products are generally more secure than windows machines. Even so, you should have some sort of AV. I dont know if mac os has a good default or not but most 3rd party options on windows are basically malware themselves. If you're going to run windows in a vm or dual boot or however it works now, windows' built in AV is solid.

Get a good browser like firefox and an adblocker plugin- ublock plus is the gold standard. This is essential, web ads are a significant attack vector for modern environments. 

Beyond that, being smart is your best defense. Dont click links in unsolicited messages, dont run apps you aren't familiar with, dont share your passwords, etc. 

You probably don't need a vpn. If you insist, basically anything but nordvpn.

Keep copies of anything important in multiple places. Your local computer, web storage, off site physical storage. The idea being losing access or integrity in any single source isn't catastrophic. Keeping only online copies of things is terrible advice. Thats just someone else's computer you currently have permission to use, and that can change for no good reason.

7 hours ago, Sumez said:

If all you need is 1MB data, MMC5 is absolutely the least practical way to go about it.
But I guess if physical production runs are never something you'd consider, it doesn't make a difference.  

I was just curious if that was the only reason, or if it actually needs any of MMC5's crazy features.

MMC5 is also super flexible with banking, there are no fixed banks that other advanced mappers have. Without looking at the rom I'd bet that figures in. Mmc3 has two fixed banks that both smb2/3 would expect to use themselves. That's less of an issue if you can swap banks with no restrictions.

4 hours ago, Sumez said:

Wow, that's really interesting.
I'm curious why it needs MMC5 where MMC3 should be suffecient?

Though I'm going to assume it's a hacker default of "let's just target the most versatile one and not worry about it again" since most hacks are only ever expected to run on emulators.

Stock Mmc3 supports a max of 512K prg and 256K chr. A 1MB rom would be too much data, even if you broke it down to prg/chr chunks. MMC5 can do 1MB of each. Metal slader glory uses all of that iirc, or at least the translation does. 

Theoretically you can have any max size you want, if you can design a mapper to support it. That ff7 demake is 2MB i think, on a custom mapper. What ends up being practical is a different story.

the altera chip is a cpld, a programmable logic chip like an fpga but less complex. i'm guessing that's implementing whatever subset of mmc5 functionality is needed to run the rom. (it can't do the whole feature set on its own)

the top left chip looks like flash rom. the 628512 bottom right is a 512K ram chip if i'm googling it right. the 24512 is a 64K ram chip. i would guess the flash rom has all the data, and the 512K ram chip serves as chr. the skinny ram is probably for saves. small chips might be multiplexers, cic clones, ram protection, or whatever.

59 minutes ago, Tulpa said:

There's glass made for document/diploma frames that is museum quality, used to preserve diplomas (which are usually on display in a lighted area for decades.) It blocks like 99% of UV light. I wonder if they use that film.

That sounds expensive and probably overkill for all but the most valuable collection pieces. The stuff im thinking of you can buy rolls of from like home depot and cut to fit windows. Its probably not preservation grade but good enough for most collection stuff.

This has been a concern in the back of my mind for a while. Most of my stuff is stored away from light right now, but eventually i want it in shelves. You can get uv blocking film to apply to glass, so that's my general plan, shelves with glass/plexi doors and uv film.

The indiana pedigree is the first video game collection i would accept as a legitimate in line with what the term implies in other mediums. It'd be interesting to know what titles were in there- potential for some big surprises.

That guy who originally purchased that sticker sealed smb and kept it forever wouldve been another candidate with his games but that ship sailed before grading games was an option.

The carolina collection thing was insulting although i dont know who gets the ultimate blame for that. Are those games labeled as such by wata?

Since its topical, here's a current project. Bought this EVO off ebay non working and its pretty obvious why. There's no saving that board. Roms look fine (untested) so they're moving to a Troy aikman board. Its a different rev but the evo cart is pretty well beat already, decent filler copy but not a prize. Actual carts released with this same evo board are pretty sparse. Theres a $10 super fami game that would have worked if i really needed it. Anyway ive got the chips off both boards and its just a matter of soldering them down now, then testing.

i've done lots of repairs of various types. 

labels- i've glued several, nothing terribly expensive. most of them have been in terrible shape to start so it was mostly a matter of keeping things from getting totally destroyed. i bought some non-wrinkling glue from a hobby shop and use it sparingly

shells- if you crack or break a chunk off where its visible i think it's reasonable to reinforce or reattach as clean as you can. it'd be extremely difficult to cleanly fix a missing chunk with a piece from a donor shell, but if you can i would be ok with it. i'd still probably not do it on something expensive. if the internal tabs are broken, then do whatever you have to keep it functional.

7 hours ago, Tulpa said:

Probably not, but it's usually the opposite that happens, as chips are more likely to fail than boards. A failed chip is replaced with an EEPROM with the code. In that instance, I'd probably want the original chip taped inside the shell somewhere so that all the original parts are at least together. But I'd expect it to go for less than one that's completely original and intact.

If the board is damaged, I would think jumper wires, as ugly as they are, would be more acceptable than a swapped board.

has not been my experience. mask roms are almost always fine. occasionally the mapper chips fail, sometimes ram, sometime the boards fails invisibly. i've fixed a bunch where the board is physically trashed but roms are fine.

if it's a high dollar title i'll do my best to find the correct rev board to use as a donor. otherwise i'll find something clean that works. it's all still official parts either way. i have thought about buying a donor board for some batman rotj mask roms i have left over, but haven't pulled the gone on that.

in cases where the rom is actually bad, i've replaced the bad chip with an eprom and tacked the dead rom inside the shell. this *significantly* devalues the game though, you might be better off leaving it non working for something rare.

batteries are service parts, no issue replacing them. i usually install a clip as well.  

1 hour ago, Kguillemette said:

Being a New Englander, I take for granted how well adapted both myself and my State(NH) are at dealing with extreme weather fluxuations. I've dealt with stretches of over 100 for weeks on end, and also stretches of under -10.

 

I continue to hope and pray that this endless blame deflecting is put aside and we can put our focus on fixing problems at hand. Regardless of blame, the most recent cold snap that went through the Midwest and pushed south has exposed how entirely unprepared we are at dealing with such drastic weather changes. Temperature alone shouldn't be resulting in natural disasters.

 

Texas is unprepared because their leadership (guess which side) ignored a 2011 fema report warning about this very thing, and took no action to winterize their energy supplies and production.

And now that its happened, deregulated energy producers shut down down rather than paying spiking gas prices, until they were given free pass to gouge their customers for it. 

They are blaming windmills for this, despite renewable energy overperforming since this started.

People have a right to ask whatever they want for their work. The nesmaker aspect doesnt dictate one way or the other, its just a tool people can buy to enhance their abilities. 

We as a community have been very fortunate to have many talented people sharing their work freely for a long time. We have a strong homebrew culture been built on that foundation. I dont see it going away. 

Anyone selling new work at this point is going to have to show up with something impressive. Very few homebrews clear that bar, and I'm betting most nesmaker titles dont either. If anything its likely going to resign those projects to obscurity.

1 hour ago, VegHead said:

This is more than a hypothetical. Capcom, Disney, and others have re-released physical SNES carts in the last few years. I cannot speak to their sales numbers, but they've done well enough in these limited cases that there were subsequent re-releases. There have also been fresh releases of foreign games that never got a legal, local release. It would seem decades of bootlegs didn't erase the market for the real deal when it came around.

I think when it comes down to it, if there's a desire in the market, and the owner/company cannot or will not satisfy that demand, you will invariably end up with bootlegs to bridge the gap.  I believe this is the case in almost every aspect of commerce, although I don't think a universal ethic can be applied. 

This is something i forgot about, that official holy diver cart release from a couple years ago. That was bootleg only for a long time if you wanted a nes version. 

I own a bootleg and famicom original and still bought the nes release. There are several other famicom only games i would pay a reasonable price for a licensed nes release.