fcgamer

The interview source you keep referencing is actually an article written by the author of NES World, who even mentioned that the guy he spoke with before writing his article had left the company by Febs of 1990, right before the time that what we are interested in occurred. For the ebay auctions, surely you can find them on Go Collect's NA archive without much trouble, you've already shown your elite skills earlier.

Oh I totally agree with this, my point is that one, maybe two (from my recollections) have unknown provenance.

Nah, it's you dude. Enough with the cheap shots and dick moves, we aren't playing werewolf here so there's honestly no need for it. For stuff as this cartridge, it's worth looking at every lead, examining every detail, be it big or small. Yes, chip scrubbing is relevant. And oddly enough, you then made a comparison to chip scrubbing in arcade machine PCBs, is that exactly the same as me making comparisons between the NES 72 pin unlicensed market and the 60 pin famicom unlicensed market? It's the same exact thing, though at least in my case, the games ShareData was making were referred to as Famicompatible. I get it, you don't want the game to "count" as you'd never be able to finish your full set or whatever, but for the rest of us, we are just trying to gather information to paint a more accurate picture of this company, as well as the ShareData Chiller carts, no matter what conclusions are ultimately drawn.

The chips bit is like the screens bit - it doesn't prove anything, either way, and shouldn't be interpreted as such. Regarding quantities, if the thing was only sold via mail order, for four months, it easily could result in a situation where only a very few copies were sold. Regarding the obtainment of the carts, yes that should be taken into consideration, but at least one cart was obtained from a random eBay auction, possibly two (I seem to recall seeing a second one sell by itself at auction back in the day as well).

No, screens were from two shorter articles, the length being the screens

The other articles seem to be just that, short blurbs. I'll try to refind and message you the links later, maybe there was a way to register and see more but I couldn't find it.

It's not related to the NES stuff or Nintendo, pm me your email address and I'll e-mail you the article, though I'm not gonna post the whole article here .

In the other post I posited that CD initially did the manufacturing for ShareData - this seems more plausible than ShareData opting to go all-in and buy more crap to assemble carts themselves, when in debt with interest rates of 30%, unable to sell their bread and butter computer game software, especially when ShareData was getting all their stuff from Color Dreams anyway, from shells to boards to lockout chip defeating technology. So I don't think it was some concious effort of taking the cart, or theft by lack of return - it's more likely, it was just lying around the office as it was a project CD was working on.

The information is taken out of context, but to be fair, I didn't post the whole article. The injunctions ShareData were hit with were from IJE, in regards to ShareData's Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, etc software for computers. The injunctions were not related to Nintendo at all.

Remove the pic, I already reported you for harassment BTW. As mentioned earlier, no need to sink to that level of posting personal pictures of members from 20 years ago.

Yeah it is a Game Axe Color. Nice to know I'm not the only one here who had one

I think it's more likely that Color Dreams handled the assembly / production of the blue Chillers, and that ShareData had nothing to do with it in that aspect. This type of scenario happens all the time in manufacturing. Regarding Mikkelsen, he was involved at Color Dreams and at American Video Entertainment. People in his sphere had industry connections to AGCI, ShareData, Tengen, Sachen, IdeaTek, C&E, etc - all the unlicensed big names of the time. This is quite normal, industry folks don't live in a bubble. My point is that he found the cart in a box of his junk from his NES game dev days, who knows why he had it, but I'd honestly imagine that it's more likely it was just lying around randomly when he packed his bags.

@the_wizard_666The New York Times article I sent you is contemporary with the GamePro adverts, being printed towards the end of March of 1990. Perhaps the article is a bit messy since it references November and December and stuff like that, but the references are to the previous year, in 1989. Therefore the blurb about the new NES venture definitely relates to this topic - ShareData was struggling financially, and it appears that's possibly the reason for them moving to NES games. I found another article later mentioning that after AGCI filed for bankruptcy or whatever, ShareData was one of the companies involved trying to get money or whatever. I don't remember the specifics as I saw it late last night, around 3 AM. It was behind a paywall though so I couldn't read the whole thing. Between both articles, I personally got the feeling that ShareData set up AGCI as a way of removing financial liabilities from themselves during their own financial troubles, but at this point it's just my personal speculation.

@Dr. MorbisReported, no need to post personal photos / information of people without their consent. That's a low you didn't have to stoop to.

I would like to disbute this claim, with all due respect. The latter half has no facts to back it up, and the earlier half feels a bit shaky too. It'd be better to just present the facts, imo.

Another thing I noticed: in the ShareData chiller, the chip codes are scratched off. From my understanding, Color Dreams had done thus themselves, as this was relating to the lockout chip bypass mechanism that they created. Not really sure why they would scrub the code from a demo cartridge not leaving the company's hands, but whatever.

You are starting to get a bit irritating, and I have the patience of a saint. I just got done looking at a sampling of Color Dreams games on the boot god website. From what I can tell, Color Dreams' switch from blue shells to black shells also corresponds pretty much spot-on with their switch from the old PCBs with eproms to their new PCBs with mask ROMs. I mention this as it would have been mid to late 90s, I suspect, which would have also been the time American Game Cartridges switched PCB designs to their own PCBs, which ultimately just are a copy of the second version of Color Dreams' PCBs. On the Boot God site, for the Chiller entry, it also has the following text, for what it's worth: "Est First Run May 1990"

More garbage theories from you, not presenting any facts and just muddying up the thread. From the above articles from the NYT and others, the NES venture was looking to be their swan song, of course they would go cheap initially, I mean, CD might have even been doing the production for them originally. I think CD also switched to mask ROMs later... So yeah, all your above post did was add unnecessary confusion for those who are interested in finding out the truth

I distinctly remember one cart being sold in eBay back in the day. It was the first time I (and likely many others) ever saw the blue Chiller cartridge, it was sold in a lot with other NES games. Of course folks connected with the company would be likely to have some of these, it's akin to how some folks got NWC cartridges from those working to host the event. The rest is just your personal opinions and theories.

With all due respect, this is just as relevant as the stuff I posted earlier about other unlicensed companies and their operations. How some other (unnamed?) software companies operated has no relationship to how ShareData or AGCI operated.

I just wanted to quote this post. This is definitely true, a lot of the Color Dreams (and some of the other unlicensed companies) were using eproms in their retail carts at that time. This led to numerous situations where "prototype/demo" game cartridges from these companies had been found, and collectors had no real way of determining if they were legit or not, outside of where the cartridge came from. My point is that the eproms don't really prove anything, one way or another.

Regarding point 1: I'm not going to mention it again, aside from the fact that a website owner's opinion was misinterpreted as being a quote from an employee. I'm not trying to be pedantic here, rather I'm just pointing out this fact, whether it changes anyone's opinion or not, well that's for them to decide. Regarding point 2: It was a lot harder to track down people back in those days, as well as a lot harder to access news archives, etc. There were tons of pay walls, social media consisted primarily of MySpace, and Nintendo Age wasn't even around. There were small pockets of collectors on Martin's forum, a lot hung out on Digital Press, etc. Really different times, and those of us who were doing research did an excellent job all things considered. Back then, it was also somewhat "way too soon" to be asking strangers questions about these things. We were researching this stuff in the late 90s and early 2000s, only ten years after they occurred. I had a few people who were even worried I was from the legal department of Nintendo, after initially messaging them. It's not like now where the stuff occurred 30 years ago, AND collecting has become mainstream.

Regarding the whole AVE thing, until I brought it up to Phleo last year or so, no one here had any clue that Ave was formed just to give a Taiwanense company the chance to sell their chips. Lol. Such a western centric perspective these articles take, based on half baked theories. As mentioned earlier, Ive been there before, but now I prefer the reality.

Iirc , it was Richard Frick who the Nolans called up confirming the AGCI Wallybear based on a newspaper advert.

Dude, you do realise that I also ran and maintained a prominent website back in that era, right? Martin Nielsen, TSR, nesplayer, Niels, tootai, nes.god, dreamtr, portnoyd, etc - we all were involved in researching shit years ago, throw in Frank cifaldi, b00dah, et all . As there wasn't tons of concrete information, we interviewed folks, did meta crawler / dog pile searches, then constructed articles based on our findings and theories, accuracies be damned. Different times.