NoWaves

My feeling on, this, and piracy in general, is that the people pirating your game aren't likely to have been paying customers in the first place (especially releases for decades old hardware). Whether or not they "deserve" to be able to play the game or not, it's unlikely you'd see a decrease in revenue. There's also the people who are interested enough to emulate it, but not pay the money for a physical release, might end up grabbing a copy because they liked the game so much. Hell, most of my collection is stuff I pirated as a kid before I had any money and played in emulators. That being said, people making repros with said dump, when the game is readily available from official sources is scummy as all hell. If that's the case with this person, I wouldn't sell, or I'd at least sell a "personalized" copy. Otherwise, I'd say go for it, and possibly upload the ROM yourself so the people searching for the ROM get it from you and are even aware physical releases exist, and get familiar with you as a developer.

That's the main reason I'd even consider it. My other love is Dreamcast, but I'm just going to get an ODE and call it a day. Even have an extra with a bad laser kicking around for exactly that purpose. I've gotten really into the whole digital preservation thing as of late. It's one thing to maintain old consoles, but another to keep a whole library of games in good shape. Discs inevitably rot, after all. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE physical media, but between degradation and inaccessibility, I'd rather support efforts to preserve things either digitally, or through reproduction. Personally, I'd like to keep the experience of the original hardware alive, as much as possible, for as many people as possible, or at least that's my hope.

For me, the price hikes hit just as soon as I finally got income to start properly accumulating the games I want. It's been a bit demoralizing. I've recently adopted a philosophy of "Nothing But Bangers" where I only get what I know I want to/I'm going to play. Kind of takes the fun out of grabbing a strange random game you've never heard of and booting it up, but odds are if it's any good, no matter how common, it's prohibitively expensive. (Looking at you, Silent Hill & Pokemon) (Nintendo in general, really) ($50 MAX for anything with a Greatest Hits release). One day I'd like to get an N64 full set, but I've got the rest of my life to do that, I'm in no rush, and I'm not averse to repros for the rarer games. Aside from that, I'm going to be doing one game at a time, and playing them as I get them, unless an absurdly good deal comes along, but I doubt it.

That's actually the thread I found, hit the A's on the NES list. It's what got me searching the forums for similar efforts and got me to join.

Hi, I'm NoWaves, I'm 25 and I've been collecting games/consoles (mostly consoles if I'm being honest) since I was about 8. My main interests as of late have been digital preservation, mostly high quality scans and documenting game contents, etc, and the accessibility of this data. I would also say cartridge dumps, but that's probably the one thing that IS comprehensively archived, mirrored, and accessible. My current pet project is documenting what we have and don't have scanned and accessible, and archiving what does exist out there. End goal being having a centralized, albeit mirrored database where these scans/other data is made available. Right now I'm doing NES (scrubbing the internet for scans, taking note of what's missing/low quality), but I think I'm going to do a Virtual Boy library as sort of a proof of concept. I actually found this site on a search for boxart, and found you guys are doing incredible work here as far as documenting goes, and I'd love to be a part of it.