Originally posted by: Guggles
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.