Ive not sold it. Ive decided to donate it to a good cause. I cannot think of a better place it can go where it would be taken care off, preserved as well as being available for people to enjoy. Im excited about it and so should you. Thats all i can disclose at the moment. Everything will be revealed automatically when the time comes. Maybe run super fast in circles for the time being Patience is your friend.
I'm very happy you decided to do this. I don't understand anything about preservation, collections or valuations, but if pegged everything right, you and everyone else were basically stuck: without dumping, it wouldn't be possible to valuate it correctly; but the prospective buyer wouldn't allow dumping at all. So I suppose it's for the best, even for your original question, even if you won't get the direct financial gain from it. I appreciate your move there, and to be fair I hope you had something unique and never before seen in hand.
The bit about it being "preserved as well as being available for people to enjoy" strongly implies an intention to dump and release it as far as I can see. Or am I missing a possible alternative meaning?
I appreciate your willingness to do that. Hopefully once it’s been dumped it will turn out to be a real prototype/location test unit.
Well, I'm happy to hear that, and I apologize if I came off too strongly in my original posts. We've had a history of hoaxes in the past and I wanted to balance the excitement with some needed skepticism. I hope I'm wrong and that it's legitimate! Waiting patiently for the outcome.
Who and where are you donating this to? I find it very suspicious you went from having a buyer ready to pay to cancelling the sale and donating it to an unknown third party within four days. I don't see a need to hide the person who will be receiving it. By telling us who it is, we'll immediately know if it's legit and going to be preserved properly. I'd like to be wrong, but I've been around long enough to see too many fake game prototype sagas play out like this.
I didn't really read the entire thread but I guess I should add my two cents. The value of these things is suggestive, so it's hard to put an evaluated price on things like this despite what people say. Regardless if this was dumped and released or not, the rarity of the thing itself will always have high inherent value. So if you decide to sell it, you'll get a pretty penny for sure, I don't think you have to worry about that. If you're serious about dumping this, I recommend sending the unit to someone from MAME's Dumping Union (contact [email protected] or send [email protected] and we'll help you out). I don't recommend dumping the PCB yourself as there might be some anti copy/bootleg protection tomfoolery like suicide batteries that might kill some of the chips on the board. It's unlikely in this case as I suspect what you have is a localization test prototype, rather than a commercially sold unit, so the PCB probably has a lot of socketed EPROMs on the PCB. It'd be cool if you could take a picture of the inside so we can look at the PCB. What I recommend so that everyone is happy - send the PCB to someone from the Dumping Union (email either of the two addresses above) and have them decap/dump the EPROMs on the board. Have them send it back after it's done and, since people obviously want to play it, have the ROMs be entered into MAME as part of the set so everyone can play it. Once you get the PCB back, put it up on eBay for the price you think it's worth. I guarantee if you make it an auction at 4k as a starting bid you'll probably get more than what the private seller wants. At the end of the day it's your PCB so you're free to do what you like with it, but there's definitely a solution that can make everyone happy.
