I just want to highlight that we should be super appreciative of this attitude, as Nik/Retro Gamer is under no obligation to do this. They could defend their copyright to protect back issue sales, especially now that digital back issues can be purchased forever without the worry of physical copies being sold out.
It would have gone for much less frankly if not for the attention we gave it (twitter, twitch, etc.). I give it $2-3k. So it's a win win.
I got the finished listing link, that's for sure: https://web.archive.org/web/20210131205944/https://www.ebay.com/itm/274657181927 Plus, there's an earlier archive of the link while the listing was in progress, dated January 25th.
Still can't believe Buckaroo released it for free. I'm glad the action went for so much, he deserves it.
I was watching the auction but knew there'd be no chance in hell of it being within my price range. Glad he got 13 grand out of it. Maybe it'll end up in a museum in the future.
When I was working on The One Ring / ReadySonic, I extended the layout of Marble Zone Act 2 just a tad, so it wouldn't be quite as abrupt and it wouldn't be so easy to catch the Bonus Plate graphics in the act of loading in. I was pretty pleased until I got bug reports of the Special Stage background glitching out, and it took me ages to track down the cause: The Dynamic Level Events routine runs even during Special Stages, and after beating Act 2, Marble Zone Act 3's routines were running. If Act 2 was long enough, Sonic's X position would be at the point at which the Act 3 routines would trigger loading the Robotnik boss graphics, overwriting the Special Stage VRAM and causing all sorts of havoc. I added the fix for this as a permanent mod to ReadySonic, writing this at the time: Ever since, I've wondered if Act 2's abrupt ending was because Sonic Team themselves encountered the same issue, had no time to track down the true cause, and cut the level down as a quick fix. So when playing the prototype, I was really interested to know if Act 2 was longer... what a surprise to discover that not only was it longer, but significantly so! How surreal to play new authentic Yasuhara layouts, even such minor scraps! Because so much else from the prototype was previously known, cool as it is, it's the extra Marble stuff that's my personal favourite thing about it.
Mytical sonic 1 beta mystery solved, He bought it on eBay for £30 in November, A review was written without the source of how he found. Someone paid $13k, Mystery solved. As leaked in multiple places this is the original sale link for £30. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/33380625689 https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Vintage-...pares-or-not-working-With-Games-/333806256891 This is exactly one of the reasons I'm no longer part of the preservation scene. People are too greedy and there's too many doing messed up stuff such as hacking developers for data/scamming people for data or being down right greedy when selling.
Wow, very lucky to have bought it for 30 pounds plus tax & shipping. And a lot of dumb luck to have come across it.
I mean, isn't that kind of the exact story he said? He got it in a lot with other random stuff, with no real knowlwdge of where it came from? Now that we know the details of the seller he bought the lot from, someone could try and chase the origin story one more rung up the ladder, but it's basically just what he said. Of course he made a killer profit, but nothing wrong with that either. The seller didn't know what he had and sold it way below value. Happens with all kinds of things all the time. I mean, I picked up a boxed mint condition Kolibri for the 32x for $10 in a lot of other games. Nothing dishonest I spotting and buying a bargain. At least he released the ROM for free, before he'd made a cent. Most people wouldn't do that.
I had a cartridge that looked identical to the Simon Wai Sonic 2 beta. Identical. Got it in a random lot for about $30 on ebay, from a guy in Darwin, Australia. It was final retail code, but thus stuff turns up in all kinds of silly places. Plenty of undiscovered protos sitting in boxes in random people's garages forgotten, or dev hardware on the bottom shelf in a random cupboard in an old game studio. That kind of thing is becoming less common, but it still happens.
I adore stories like this. From people finding a Stadium Events or even an NWC, to this, it gives me hope that there are still many more discoveries lurking in the attics and basements of the world. It's exciting!
This would make sense if the ROM dump hadn't been released before he reauctioned the cartridge. But it was dumped, released and documented, then sold again. How in the world is that greedy?
Maybe N!NJA was referring to people other than Bukaroo? At least Bukaroo contributed to the community, and I feel glad for that
It's probably why the best way to convince a private collector to agree to extracting their exclusive carts is due to deterioration of the physical medium where the data's value becomes null when one can't access the game within. And that to maintain the value of the object as high as it is, extracting the data as a back up is necessary or else the collector will only be able to sell plastic at a much reduced return on their investment. Then as to why a collector should be fine with the data going around the Internet, it would be fine because the collector still holds the limited edition physical copy, and if the chips that hold the data need replacing, perhaps it would be possible to replace those while still retaining other parts of the cartridge and being able to resell it without issue. That people will still desire to hold that historic physical cartridge than just to have a common digital copy. It's much more special in its intrinsic value (to be holding something that the developers where handling back in the '90s) than a digital copy.
Good for Buckaroo to come across it and do the right thing. Things could have gone very differently, it could have ended up being tossed away some day, or hoarded like the rest in existence. And now everyone will regret why it wasn't them who bought a broken Mega Drive with games and could have made their money from it.
yea, the context of dumping is the difference between "beanie baby hoarder but with carts that will decay" vs "enthusiast who is happy to have a piece of history". One is delusional garbage and the other is harmless.
Is anyone else slightly tickled by the £9000 sale price, plus £3.50 P&P? I reckon I'd have just knocked that off if it were me...
