Quote Originally Posted by jonebone View Post
Now, now, if any of you actually read the threads on NA, you'd know many of us thought it was a silly idea, myself included. It's just that the mods tend to come down with an iron fist to prevent arguments from spiraling out of control, which is actually a good thing. Constructive criticism is great, but jealous and spiteful comments are just childish. Grow up a bit.
I don't care about comics, really, but if I walked into someone's house and saw that they had disassembled Action Comics #1 and put the unbound pages into tasteful, art deco frames to hang on their wall, I'd call them an idiot. Same with this dude. He took something that's a bit more than a simple commodity; a piece of history with, what, fifty or so pieces known to exist, and wrecked it. Good job.

That's neither childish, nor spiteful. It's the truth, and calling it otherwise will not change it. I admit that doing so was entirely his prerogative as the owner, but it's still within my rights to call him an idiot, because that's how he's acting.

I also thought exposing the EPROMs was tremendously stupid, but some experts have chimed in and mentioned only UV light should damage them. I don't know or really care, but it still seems silly to me.
Simple sunlight produces enough UV light to mess up an exposed EPROM over time. Like I said, you don't need to entirely erase the EPROM; just frag enough of the data to render the cart unplayable. Hang that fucker on a living room wall, and it'll be unplayable pretty quick-like, and never mind what the VGA says about the UV protection of the slab. Even the RISK of it should have given him pause.

However, one important thing for any NWC or prototype owner to consider is that all of these carts are ticking time bombs. Today we can argue about how much a non-working cart would devalue the item, but in the not too distant future, all of these carts will be non-working. Does that mean they are magically worth $0? I think not.
Consider that, outside of the members of a very few NES collecting sites, no one gives a shit about owning an NWC cart, because the cart itself is completely irrelevant. It's the data that's on there, the game itself. I'll grant that a non-working NWC cart might be worth something years from now to a select, highly specialized group of NES collectors, but a non-working proto? Hell no. It's ONLY VALUE is the game on the cart, or disc. Once that's gone, it's dead, inert, worthless plastic. Your average proto isn't on some master "completion" list to be checked off. To collectors, they're 'investments' or novelties.

This is why I get so angry with prototype owners who hoard their protos. That fourteen ounce piece of plastic and silicon is worth exactly zero dollars. It's what's on it that counts, and the history of it. We'll never get to play Resident Evil 1.5 because some asshat is hiding it under his bed because he's afraid that it won't be worth as much if it gets put up for everyone to play. This is a crazy concept to me. especially considering the inevitable loss of data... and therefore the loss of their 'investment'.


People haven't come to grips with reality yet, but these will still have value regardless of their working condition. Prototypes really scare me the most, because once that data is gone... does it still have any value? That's a much more interesting debate IMO.
Some value, maybe. Not $27,000 in cold hard cash. Eventually, it's just going to be the guys on NA selling their carts back and forth like some kind of continual, checking account draining circle jerk, pretending that it's OK that none of their carts work anymore because the very fact that they USED to work makes them valuable somehow.

I feel bad for people like that. Hey, guys! Remember when the reason we used to own games was because we like to PLAY THEM? Wasn't that awesome?