I didnt read any posts in this thread but i can tell you i am lost on this video.

Please tell me why again someone who owns a prototype should dump them for free? What is up with this entitled attitude....crazy man. Somethings in life you have to have 1 money and 2 opportunity in order to experience and im fine with that. I just dont get this logic .

My dad has a friend that has a 6 figure ford mustang from the 1960s. Based on that logic its his duty to put it by the side of the road with keys in it for everyone to enjoy

Flawed logic. Dumping = Copy. It's not about lending a prototype it's about giving a copy.

No one gives two shits about driving someone's old car.

Well, dumping is important for preservation if the cartridge ever fails (EEPROMs are particularly vulnerable to cosmic rays). Dumping the ROM data doesn't mean you have to release it.

You may not give a shit about driving an old car just like i dont give a shit if every single videop game gets copied.

some things take time and effort and often money to aquire i.e. Games, cars whatever and it is up to the owner to do with as they may.  

This attitude that they should all be dumped is crazy.   I dont have any prototypes but i imagine its a pretty cool feeling knowinf you have the only one.  

If you dont like it do something about like search for them and buy them and thne dump them.  But insisting all these protos get dumped is no different than you telling someone else how to spend their money

I guess I care more about preservation than you do since I feel like everyone should dump their protos. Bitrot is bad, I hope you know that.
Note that I didn't say release. Even if I want everyone to dump and release.
 

dont get me wrong i think we are on the same page.   As a non owner of prototypes i would love all of them to get dumped and released.  I just dont lose any sleep over it adn i dont think its a travesty if they dont.

 someone who now owns the prototype has a valuable item that they probably spent time energy and money to aquire.  if they dump the rom you never know what could happen, computer gets hacked, a "friend" comes over and swipes it off their computer on a thumb drive to release etc. 

These are all unlikely scenarios but im just saying the chances of the cart getting stolen is one thing but once put on a pc it opens up another level of risk.  If an owner decides they just want to enjoy owning it to themselves great


 

 You're saying if they dump it and don't release it then these bad things are a risk?

The responsible thing would be to dump it, save it to an external media device and store it in a safety deposit box or safe. If it's not connected to the internet no one can "hack" into it. And taking some basic safety precautions eliminates any risk of physical theft. 

 

No, they're not.  EPROMs on the otherhand....

All these experts man, I'll tell ya...

Eliminates the risk of losing the ROM, but there's still a big potential for financial loss if there were a physical theft of the cart. 

I've probably posted this same thing before, but I have no problem with people not dumping their protos if they don't want to. If I bought an "undumped" proto I'd expect that it's not been dumped anywhere. Even if not publicly released.

And I agree with what has been said plenty of times. If you don't like it, go put in the hard work of tracking these down or put up the money to buy every proto and dump it to your personal thumb drive or something and lock it in a vault. You'll be the savior of video gaming history, but people will still hate you for not releasing everything. 

I feel like dumps are definitely important for historical preservation and archiving purposes. Prototypes are like museum pieces, but with the benefit that the data they contain can be copied and shared with the rest of the world in a way that greatly benefits the understanding of a game's development. I understand these things are collector pieces but at the same time what good are they if they aren't archived? The worst could always happen and these carts could end up destroyed or damaged, whether it's by a house flood or a burglary or what, and I mean, everyone's mortal. What's gonna happen to these games when the owner is gone? They're gonna be pieces of history lost forever. These things could be actual museum pieces one day years and years in the future for all we know. Preserving the data is critical for the history of video games in general, whether it's a super popular game or some shitty movie license title.

I get that these things are expensive tho and I could never imagine paying out of pocket for something like this, but I also can't look at it as a treasure-swap scenario where the focus is financial gain and there's a sort of smug atmosphere of "I have something no one else has". I mean, I see undumped protos as TCRF pages waiting to be written. The thing about "go look for protos yourself then to dump" is that you don't usually see multiple protos of the same game up at once, yknow? If someone had a prototype for Super Mario World (which would be freaking killer) what chance do I have to find another one?

I've lost interest in prototypes, overall. The amount of money that's been invested into preserving incomplete, unplayable ROM images of games is astounding, and they seldom get played or look at for pleasure. It's not the same as enjoying another incomplete, creative form, such as music or literature, or other forms of art that are outputs of the human mind in a dynamic, less artificial way than games are, because games were meant to be wholly functional and interactive to have merit. Even most completed games that have been dumped are often shit. There have been some worth seeing, such as Star Fox 2, but that one was free if I recall, salvaged from an ex-dev's PC. There are only about two or three unreleased prototypes I'd want to see, and the only one I'd assume was ever playable is Dragon Hopper. Twelve Tales and Sonic 1 protos would be cool, but again, mostly unplayable and I'd get bored of them and move on. I'm more about dumping complete, playable prototypes these days tan unfinished ones. There has been some interesting light shed upon their history, but like I said, those ones tend to get dull very fast and then forgotten. Sonic's documentation of its alpha/beta versions had a lot of community and history to back it, but many of these aren't filled with as much iconic significance. I definitely would love to see the early protos of Mario World shown in those magazines, but for the most part, I sort of just shrug and move on from prototype news nowadays.

Preservation. Just because you own a physical proto does not mean you own the information on it.

there is the problem for me right there.   telling a stranger what the responsible thing to do with their rare or unique item is in bad form in my opinion.  Again i agree with you it would be great if all prototypes were dumped it is ultimately the owners choice. 

its no different then telling an art collector they shouldnt have rare art in their house it should be in a museum.  It sounds great but its the owners decision to do what they think is reponsible not what the masses do.
 

That doesn't prevent the owner to take a picture of it and show it off. Your logic really insists there's one and only one thing and cannot be copied. To be honest I feel like I have to tell owners to dump their protos, because I think they HAVE TO. As shitty as it sounds, it's a duty at this point. I don't care what they think.

EDIT: Because I'm scared someone takes this the really wrong way, I didn't say the word "release" once.

I guess i just have to agree to disagree.  Why do they have to?  I mean as little risk as that exposes them to it is still a risk.  Also its their property why do they have to do anything with it.  I mean saying it would be a good idea sure but the comments like "have to" "responible" and "they have a duty" is crazy.  Its their property 

 

It's only what I think but owning a prototype just to own it and not even dump it is something even crazier.

Always so much anger whenever Pat gets mentioned lol. It's just one guys opinion we all have them! I don't know a lot about protoculture but if you're spending thousands of dollars on something very rare and unique that's yours to do with as you please. The companies that made them did not release them commercially so they have basically washed their hands of it. While I think it would be a total waste to buy something like this only to destroy it that's still totally up to the person that has it. People have shelf collected far more expensive things over the years. If you want a proto dumped then pony up the cash for it and make it happen.

I dont care about pat either way i have watched about 15 minutes of hos thoughts in my life he is ok just like most youtubers nothing earthshattering and certianly nothing worth getting bent about it just caught me offgaurd how relentless they are in telling people what they should do with their games

If it was worth saving chances are it would have i just dont know why this is a big deal. As stated most protos are terrible


If anything kudos to the guys who got after protos early and often and are in position to command high dollar for their items or just enjoy the fsct they own one of a kind stuff. Nothing wrong with that

My ass is chapped

THANKS PAT! THANKS A LOT BUDDY.

There is never going to be a consensus when you have some people trying to make a profit and others trying to get every NES game in an archive and to allow every person to play it on an emulator or everdrive.

From my experience, It seems that these things are mutually exclusive.

You forgot Socks. 

 

Society does it all the time with my kid.

Also I don't care if someone's things are worth 10 cents or 10 million dollars. I can dole out advice in a public forum all day long (assuming the mods or Dain don't shut me up). Just as the owner of said things can take that advice or ignore it.
 

Mitigates the financial damage though. In the event of theft or destruction (fire!) you could still sell the code to recoup some of your investment. 
 

that's a pretty great analogy actually
 

Most major art collectors loan out their collections to museums so that people can see them. Because what is art if people can't see it? Plus museums are generally much better set up to ensure the preservation of artwork. A couple of months ago, I went to an exhibit of the works of George Rouault, and a significant portion of the paintings belonged to private collectors.

Let's be realistic though, 95% of the prototypes out there are almost indistinguisable from the commercial release. There are a handful that are of games that were not released, and most of those have been properly preserved (i.e. dumped). Although I keep close track of all SNES prototypes out there for the sake of documentation, the stories behind them are quite lacking, and are not really the works of art that some people in this thread are alluding to.

The real travesty is how little the companies that made these games have preserved. Considering we are 20 years on from the end of the SNES era of dominance, we have seen little in the way of developer interviews, conservation of old computers that made these games, few pieces of source code and original art assets, and we don't have public development tools to analyze them even if we did. Basically, for most games all we have of that are what little was done in contemporary video game magazines. Let's face it, video game journalism was not exactly high brow at that time (and really, still isn't, with a few exceptions). While we have been bickering for the past 15 years about the occasional interesting prototype that somehow made it into the hands of private collectors, we have missed the forest that is an aging group of programmers, and the demise of many of the companies that were active at the time. I remember researching Socks the Cat, for instance, and was shocked that none of the people who had worked on the game had any material left over from the making of the game, except from a few mockups of advertisements. Hell, even the people who worked at the original publisher were unaware that the game had actually been completed (something that was confirmed by the developer, plus the fact that the prototype exists).

Alas, I fear that for a lot (probably even the majority) of games, the development assets are probably lost forever. This is perhaps the consequence of an entertainment medium that was founded on the basis of making money, rather than the intrinsic value as artwork.