So may be picking this up locally from a seller I have bought from in the past. Guy is legit and usually has some pretty high end stuff. Just want to confirm that this is authentic before I purchase. 

Also want to say that Dragons Lair was one of my favorite games growing up. Put way too much time into and super excited to potentially own a prototype of it. Cannot find much info on the web regarding any other NES prototypes and the guy claims that the physics and controls vary from the original game. States "you move at a faster pace and jump higher".

I'm no expert on prototypes, but that just looks like a normal NES board with a sticker on it.

No its definitely an eprom. I cant really speak to if its a legit proto or not however

This is my concern as well. It looks like someone took a label slapped it on and wrote the title on it. How easy is it to rewrite these eproms? Is it commonly done?

How much is he asking? It looks like it didn't sell for the $500 he was wanting on eBay after the hype article came out...

https://www.gamingconviction.com/...

Yeah anyone can do it at home if you have the right tool. 

For some reason I thought eproms werent used in original protos (they could actually flash the chip) but im not a proto expert. 

Almost all protos are EPROM. FlashROM wasn't common until the late '90s.

That is an proto board, one way or the other. Even says it's an EPROM board on the board, so it's not just a sticker on a mask ROM.

For the title, there's not much reason to doubt it. A Drangon's Lair proto wouldn't command the same huge premiums that a Zelda, Mario, or unreleased game proto would command, for example. Anyone faking it with a less valuable proto board could pick a better title to fake. If the game truly plays differently than any dumped versions then it lends credibility and value. 

that is a legit proto pcb, NES-UNEPROM. it's almost certainly a legit prototype.

It is the real deal. Looks like it is NTSC.

I trust what he ^^^^ says, Looks like a cool find OP I hope you end up with it.

Is the "Eprom" soldered into the board? If so, I'd have to ask why? It'd take effort to de-solder it just to write to it again (soldering implies a greater sense of permanence - like what you'd find in a sample cart or a finished version)? Also if it was a proto, why not version/notate it (on the label) so the user knew what they had?

All the above can be easily explained away so I'm not claiming it isn't a proto. I'm just raising questions based on a casual observation and to try and interject a different perspective.

Yes the EPROM is soldered in. Socketed EPROMS stick out so far that it can get hung up in an unmodified NES.

Typicaly there where two main reasons to produce an NES prototype. The first is debugging; the programmers needed to make sure what they were writing did what they thought it would. So they would write a bit, then test it; write a bit more, and then test it again. These frequently have socketed EPROMS and holes cut into the case for easy access and the frequency of rewriting.

The second reason is marketing; because of the long lead times involved, magazines needed preproduction prototypes in order to publish reviews of video games before they were released. These tend to have the EPROMS soldered in. They also tend to final or near final. 

As for why no version numbers, all I can say is that version numbers on NES prototypes make no sense from the outside. I have two prototypes with version numbers.  One is labeled 0.02, which in my mind should be early since there is such a big gap between 0.02 and 1.0, but it is final. The second actually has a version number greater than the final one, but is clearly an earlier build. Another possibility, and I am just guessing here, is version numbers were  not ubiquitous because they were not critical. A magazine reviewer isn't going to have access to multiple builds, so she wouldn't need version numbers to tell them apart.


 

First off I wanted to say thanks for all the wonderful insight/info. 

So I ended up picking up the game. Between seeing the cart in person and meeting the seller I believe this is indeed authentic.

The seller was top notch. Had some pretty high end items including an authentic stadium events, panic restaurant and bubble bobble 2 prototypes just to name a few...

The cart itself is pretty unique. The label is aged and while handwritten looks like its been on there for 20+ years. It is a 5 bolt and has never been screw together. You can actually see that the screw holes were never fully drilled out so you could not put a screw through it if you had to. There is some glue on the inside of the shell leading me to believe that is what they used to keep the shell together. The shell also had some of the inner tabs broken off to fit the oversized board. As far as differences in the game itself, I played through the first level and did not notice anything unusual.








you can see that the cart itself was never finished and could not house a screw.





you can see the broken tab to fit the larger board



if you look on the right side of the board you can see some residual glue which i believe was used to keep the shell together since the cart could not hold screws

Very cool. I am glad we could help. Thanks for the pictures. If you need help dumping it, let us know. There are quite a few of us with the means to do it.

Just out of curiosity, did he have an SE or an SE prototype?
 

He had an authentic stadium events, not a stadium events prototype. the panic restaurant and bubble bobble 2 were prototypes.

Would love to dump it and get it out there. If anyone is willing to help me do it shoot me a pm.

Congrat's!  Were you able to confirm the different physics?

No he said he didn't see any differences at the very end of the post with pics added after purchase. Hopefully it does have it somehow and he hasn't enabled out