Thread by @frankcifaldi

Okay everyone, I've got a video game preservation tragedy here, make sure you're sitting down.

We were recently gifted a pile of loose EPROMs for video game console games from the 90s. I spent a lot of last week identifying and connecting them. Here's the results. (1/?)

At first blush these look okay, right? Complete sets, 1-3!

Except, in literally every case, we're missing ROM 0, the first ROM in the set. All of these games are missing 25% of their data.

As you can see, most of these are first-party Game Gear. Let's look at a complete set of first-party Game Gear EPROMs, from another collection. Notice something...different?

As you can see, ROM 0 is where the tech wrote the name of the game. Why bother writing it three more times? Just label the ROM numbers after that. Makes sense, right?

So, I think we've solved the mystery, and it's infuriating:

I believe that an ill-informed collector acquired these ROMs, separated the chips that had the "game names" on them, and got rid of the ones with "random numbers" on them, forever separating the game data and ensuring everyone involved has incomplete data.

So what's next step? Obviously we trace provenance, but it's a dead end here. The person we acquired these from bought them himself well over a decade ago from a collector. That collector has zero recollection of where they came from, or whether he sold any chips to anyone else.

He's so far removed from this transaction in his life that he doesn't remember ever even possessing them.

I've gone and pinged everyone I know who collects odd prototype stuff trying to see if they bought loose chips, but no one I know has.

In olden times (3 years ago) I would have gone and blasted this on the two or three prominent collector forums, but they're all dead now, and all the major players are decentralized on about 5,000 Discords and Facebook groups.

As for the games? Land of Illusion and Asterix are final, so that's ok. Shining Force II is pre-retail and could be interesting. World Series Baseball 95 might actually be a totally unreleased World Series Baseball 96, I can't tell. It's close but not the same game. And UFOURIA:

Ufouria is one of the best games on the NES, it's a cutesy Metroidvania made by Sunsoft during its absolute prime. These chips not only seem to represent the lost U.S. NTSC version, the ROM size is actually bigger, and data suggests there may be cut features in here!

So not only did we lose what might be the last authentic NTSC copy of the game, we also potentially lost a look at what the game was meant to be before they had to cut the ROM size down. Maybe. Just a theory right now...and probably forever.