Fakes good for collectors?

Ebay should permanently ban all the repro resellers. Against EBay's policy.

>>3274916
>don't you think used game stores, places that sell used games and even craigslisters will start miss-pricing original carts because of the inability to tell repros from originals or maybe not even having any knowledge of repros existing?
I don't know what you THINK is going to happen, but I'll tell you what will happen. All the places and people that sell used games will sell the repros at the same price as the originals. Most of the sellers don't know the difference, and I'm sure many don't care. Willing to bet a large number of them won't be willing to let you open up the cart to confirm it's legit either.

Repros always have been and always will be a bad thing for collectors. Just muddies the water.

>>3275143
>Willing to bet a large number of them won't be willing to let you open up the cart to confirm it's legit either.
>Selling bootlegs is illigal.
Think they'd have to open the cart to confirm it's the actual item.

>>3274916
>Thoughts?
Another silly kid with his silly fantasies

>>3275143
>bad thing for collectors
Good I support repros then, fuck collectors with a rake.

No, I think repros will keep being overpriced before authentics ever become undervalued. Even if they suspect it's a fake, resellers will still assume it's authentic because they have their own interests in mind.

I hate repro sellers but I don't mind playing them myself. I'm going for a playable collection, not a complete collection so if I can add a fake TMNT Turtles in Time to play with a friend and it works just like the original, then I don't care as long as I got it cheap.

Used retro games are already unknowingly buying and selling repro carts.

Like the guy above said, fuck shelf collectors. They are the reason this problem came about to begin with and why the rest of us have to use flashcarts because we'd rather pay our mortgage than pay ebay prices for games that are under $20 six years ago

>>3275348

>Retro game stores

>>3275237
How many carts do you see listed on ebay that are opened so you can see the PCB?

The reason repro's are against ebay's TOS is because you would need to buy the cart and open it to tell if it's real or not, and once you open the cart the seller claims "He replaced the PCB and he's trying to scam me!" I've seen more than a few angry ebay stories about this very thing.

Hell, I've been to a few retro game stores(only once) that wouldn't let people open carts because "They might damage them". So you are stuck trying to figure out if it's a repro just by looking at the label and the connector edge of the PCB.

I'm just glad I'm not a collector so I don't have to deal with this shit.

Most of the retro game stores around here have authentic shit. At least it seems like it. Stuff looks old and beat up and dirty.

>>3274916
I think repros are better for people who just want to play the game or don't want to shell out tons of money on the real deal like an original Hagane or some shit. I'd love to play stuff like Pocky & Rocky, Metal Warriors and Hagane, but no fucking way am I shelling out hundreds for each of them. I bought an Alien Soldier repro for about $30 last year and it's great. Decent build quality, nice clean artwork on the label. I'd rather buy a cheap repro than contribute to raising the already-inflated price of some old video game. I buy games I want to play, so I suppose I am a bit of a collector which I think is alright, but I honestly don't care if I own the original thing or not. I care about saving money, and not bragging to my non existent friends about how I spent thousands of dollars on some meme game that they've never heard of.

A good, knowledgeable game store should be able to tell what's real or repro, by the PCB, shell, label etc. And even if you want to see the board before buying something, I don't see why they shouldn't open it up for you. As for people who make repros, it should be mandatory for them to have "Reproduction" or "Repro" written somewhere on the cart or label just to absolutely be certain that what they're making isn't original. I would only buy one if it had that written on there.

Are they good for collectors? I think it depends. Do you absolutely need to have a legit copy of all 700 something NES games? Or could you live with having Little Samson and Flintstones repros? I think it comes down to how picky you are with collecting.

>>3275625
>I buy games I want to play, so I suppose I am a bit of a collector which I think is alright, but I honestly don't care if I own the original thing or not. I care about saving money,

Which makes me wonder why you are buying repro's and not flashcarts. One of the two things you said isn't true, which one was it?

>>3275630
Flashcarts are great and all, I can see that they are pretty much the most economical, money saving way. I just happen to prefer owning individual, physical copies of games, repro or original, doesn't matter. Perhaps someday I'll look into a flashcart, I'd maybe use it exclusively on just the rare, expensive games. Sorry if I wasn't clear in the last post.

>>3275645
Own both. That's what I do.

>Fakes good for collectors?

Uhh no? Who is a collector? Well someone who collects, obviously, and collectors like me are a different sort of breed... I care about what I'm paying good money for... this scam repro stuff (thats what it is, anyone trying to pass off a repro as real, is scum) makes collecting difficult. You have to watch your ass buying online like at eBay and shit. People could fool your ass into paying $1000 for a repro...

>>3275348
>fuck shelf collectors
Why does he have a problem with people who collect shelves?

>>3275625
>id rather contribute to raising the already-inflated price of boolegs than contribute to raising the already-inflated price of some old video game
Oh. Ok.

>>3276216
>already-inflated price of bootlegs
chinese repros are dirt cheap

>>3275653

if you're spending $1000 for this piece of plastic or this piece of plastic maybe it doesn't fucking matter and you deserve to get duped for being a dipshit in the first place.

>>3276373
That was an unnecessarily hurtful thing to say

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>reproduction cartridges that are clearly labeled as repros or have something to differentiate it enough from the original (different label art or cartridge color) so that it can't be mistaken for the original
Good

>repros that try to look as close to the original as possible to the point that it could pass as a legit copy unless the board is inspected
Bad

>bootleg carts like pic related that are so shameless no one could possibly think it's an original or anything BUT a bootleg
Best

If you're spending over 50 bucks on a game and don't check the boards you're a fuccboi. period.

I couldn't really give less of a shit about repro labels and what not. They have their place. I have a repro label on my X3 because it didnt have one when I got it.

I buy most of my shit on eBay, so if I get a repro or bootleg, I immediatley open a case and get to keep the game -and- get my money back because it's pirated goods and therefore illegal on eBay.

You're supposed to "destroy" them, but I usually just throw them in a bootleg bin.

>>3277348
>I immediatley open a case and get to keep the game -and- get my money back because it's pirated goods and therefore illegal on eBay

Some other anons have claimed to have tried that and they didn't get a refund because the seller claimed that they replaced the real circuit board with a fake.

>>3276373
harsh, but true, I suppose.
I'm not an idiot, but when you're new to this hobby, I can see how you could get scammed. its a learning process, sure but stilll... sucks that beginners need to worry about it.

>>3276305
No they're not. You think they're cheap because you aren't old enough to remember when they were much cheaper.

>>3276467
No it wasn't. You're just a fragile snowflake.

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>>3277443
Cant get much cheaper than this.

>>3277443
AliExpress repros are being sold for less than it costs to send a blank envelope from the US to China.

>>3277534
Aren't the internal batteries really shitty though?

>>3277607
Depends, some of the higher priced sellers put battery holders inside for easy replacement.

>>3277607
Worst case, couldn't you solder in your own battery?

>>3277534
Plenty of room to get cheaper sport. They used to go for a buck here.

>>3277581
And that's one of the reasons people don't make shit in the US any more. Your fucked up postal system makes it too expensive to ship. You can ship a cart from China to the US cheaper than you can send a blank envelope from the US to China.

>>3277607
The Genesis pirates on aliexpress don't save. They all use the same PCB and it doesn't have SRAM. A few sellers do make Genesis repros with save capability but they are insanely expensive ($60 or so).

>>3277990
Holy shit.

Is it the same situation with NES/Famicom repros?

How long should Aliexpress repros take to ship? I ordered mine in mid-May and used the cheapest shipping option (free). Tracking says it hasn't even left China yet.

Maybe... if dumb collectors get taken by fakes theyll wise up or just get pissed off and stop collecting.

>>3278058
They do have a universal PCB for NES carts (haven't gotten an SNES one yet but I have one in the mail) but the NES PCB does have a spot for a battery and SRAM. No saving isn't an issue for most Genesis games as there weren't as many with a battery save feature as on SNES.

>>3278546
They'll start paying more for verified legit copies. Just buy flashcarts, people.

>>3277971
I don't get what's wrong with USA shipping, but every time I want to buy something with international shipping, all USA sellers are extremely expensive. China, Japan, Europe can ship same things much cheaper and faster to my home.
You guys don't have even something cheap like Japanese SAL?

>>3277329
the only right answer so far

>>3278763
The Chinese government subsidizes shipping. It's their latest trick to allow companies to sell for artificially low prices without breaking dumping rules. When the dopes in Washington finally figure this out and take a year to mass debate about it and then take action the whole free shipping thing will stop. Make sure you buy everything you need before then. If Chinese sellers are forced to pay the same shipping rates as everyone else shipping will go from free to $25.

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>>3274935
/thread

>>3275297
It's not the collectors who are bad, it's the resellers who dick people over with extortionate prices.

I collect but if I ever sold things, it'd be at a fair price.

>>3279503
>it's not the resellers who are bad it's the kids who dick everyone else over by paying their extortionate prices.
FTFYK

>>3274916
>>3274935

OR you faggots could just by the cheaper repros

you want to play the games of just hang an original rembrandt in the living room?

stay mad autist faggots, and keep hoarding useless plastic

Fakes are good for players that bizarrely dont want to own a flash cart for the same purpose

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>>3274916
You know what would be BEST for collectors? If someone made fake sega CD versions of games and the like. Like, of games that didn't have official sega CD releases. Get reseller scum to assume it's an ultra rare one, and then they might actually price those higher than the real ones.

It would be win-win, as this would also mean anyone could make their own versions of them.

>>3277534
What systems are aliexpress good for? genesis? snes, n64? i dont care about authenticity i just want to play the game on the system

>>3279439
>The Chinese government subsidizes shipping. It's their latest trick
And that's a good trick.
>shipping will go from free to $25.
But I can get a cartridge from Japan (or a music CD, or something small) from Japan via SAL for 7-10 USD. Meanwhile most American sellers or websites charge like 25 USD (sometimes less, but usually rates are still high) to ship somethig internationally with cheapest slowest untrackable method as well.

>>3275897
Oh I'll say!

They can't be nearly as bad as people who collect basement piles or storage lockers!

>>3275348

This. 80 dollar flashcarts being the CHEAPEST way to play on real hardware is ridiculous.

>>3281221
So what DO you know about how a flashcart could be simplified and made less flexible to be cheaper?

>>3279947
This is what I don't get at all here...you can buy what like three fakes before you're at the price of a flashcart that can hold the system's entire library. Besides potentially making the overlap of flashcart incompatible and rare games playable on original hardware I don't see any benefit whatsoever to us that this is a thing.

Of course this is fucking terrible for collectors, they're the ones who pay hundreds for a game with an uncreased manual so they're the ones who are going to get ripped off the worst.

>>3281230

Wouldn't need a flashcart if it didn't cost hundreds of dollars to get a collection of the actual carts.

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>>3281257
What do you even mean by "a collection"? Even repros could easily cost hundreds for a collection.

So what could you want, more multicarts?

>>3281427

Prices going down to what they were before collecting became hip would be nice.

>>3281445
So, you want casuals to get sickened and repulsed by games, but in such a way that they wouldn't throw out any of them or bury them in an out of the way stash, and for interest in playing games to cease?

Or for emulation to spread to everyone and for odroid cases styled like NESes?

Or for old computer games to become the in thing?

>>3281230
Not him but I've been making old school style flash carts since it was called EEPROM and using EPROMs before that. Most systems don't require much additional logic, at most a simple PLD or buffers if you're not using 5v parts. Eliminating the FGGA cuts costs massively but you loose the menu, SD, support and obviously the ease of flashing the memory from SD. This means you need an alternative way to flash the memory. That's why old school flash carts had all sorts of strange ways to write to them.
There are lots of ways to go but the end result is a reprogrammable device that costs between $5-$10 to make depending on capacity and whether you want an FRAM save.

>>3281186
Another thing along these lines, sega master system cartridge games, converted to the memory card format. They could conceivably make cheaper repros that way.

>>3281468

>implying collectors actually play games

>>3281479
*So, you want ***collectors*** to get sickened and repulsed by games, but ...

>>3281494

But I never said that anywhere.

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>>3281479
Reddit af but this applies.
>my wifes son will have so much fun playin these retrogames

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>>3281531
Ohhhhhh, I get you, you won't stoop to tolerance for any of that filth referred to as "cause and effect"?

>>3281596

What?

>>3281607
You posses disdain for thinking in terms of cause and effect, favouring the alternative framework of "good and evil" instead?

>>3281623

Are you okay, anon?

>>3281629
Am *I* okay? I'm not the one agonizing about used game prices!

>>3282085
True millions of your fellow underage are also agonizing that they have to buy on ebay because their moms won't take them to garage sales or flea markets.

>>3281193
I own a few genesis carts and snes repos. They all work out fine but just be careful when looking for games that need to save using a internal battery. Try to look online if they support saving or come with it's own battery.

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>>3274916
Im cool with it especially if its unreleased shit like starfox2

>>3282226
You forgot to call him sport and/or kiddo, anon.

>>3284395
I didn't. I didn't need to because I already called him underage, champ.

>>3282226
You can't find a god damn thing at garage sales and flea markets anymore, at least where I live.

I went to a bunch of garage sales last weekend and didn't find a single thing, not even a single shitty PS2 sports game. One of the sellers even said they'd been asked a bunch of times already that day if they had games, and this was around 10 AM.

The only thing you find at flea markets these days are booths who literally only sell used games and charge whatever the asking price is on eBay or more.

It's completely fucked.

>>3284696

You're looking in the wrong places; if you're in a fairly large city, you're already fucked.

Drive a bit to smaller cities or towns and hit up their garage sales. That's where it's at.

I'll put it this way: Where I live is considered a hub for traffic, but it's still a modestly-sized city. A friend of mine managed to make off with a LOT of stuff last year, including a box of CiB NES games that he paid $250 for that ended up all selling for $700+, excluding a pristine copy of Die Hard for NES valued at $80 that he decided to keep.

>>3284751
Too bad my city is surrounded by nothing but farmland.

>>3275371
you could go by weight. you dont have to open them.

>>3285651
i feel you, man. i went to the big community yard sale one town over and the only stuff for sale was shit like lamps and books about apples

For every 100 garage sales you go to, you'll find one with a few games. So go at your own risk.
The problem with repros is that repros make a point to look like the real deal because it's a bootleg.
And the point of a bootleg is to scam people.
>But I wanna play on original hardware!!
Get a flash cart.
>Flash cart 2 aspensiv.
If you don't have $80, save for it. It's $80 for god sake and you can play everything your console of choice has to offer. If you're in your 20's and you don't have an extra few bucks laying around you're doing a piss poor job of managing your money.
So, if what you repro supporters are saying is true and it doesn't matter how you play your games because it's just "hunks of plastic" sell your reproduction carts, buy an everdrive and never spend another dime on games for your console of choice ever again.
I used to look at $1 SNES games and think "Eh, it's just some space shooter. Fuck it, I don't need it." because, well, fuck it, it's a $1 and every store had a big bin of games.
Now stores don't have $1 games and we all feel like goofballs for not buying all the games back then. So I think this is where this whole "IM GETTIN RIPPED OFF!!!1" shit stems from.
So maybe we all gotta relax and realize gaming is an actually expensive hobby that was uncharacteristically cheap for a few years and we owe our parents thanks for buying us that shitty copy of Xardion on SNES for full price when it came out.

>>3281242
Maybe some people are so apposed to playing ROMs that they will

But some bootlegs will be nothing more than a burned rom

Own a load of carts and a few repros for bizzare stuff, but also have flash carts

>>3285716
>Now stores don't have $1 games and we all feel like goofballs for not buying all the games back then. So I think this is where this whole "IM GETTIN RIPPED OFF!!!1" shit stems from.
So maybe we all gotta relax and realize gaming is an actually expensive hobby that was uncharacteristically cheap for a few years and we owe our parents thanks for buying us that shitty copy of Xardion on SNES for full price when it came out.

Exactly.
I've been doing this for at least 10 years and there's a ton of shit that regret passing on. Sure it sucks having to pay more now, but this is a hobby that costs money just like any other. Even comparing this to other hobbies, video games are still pretty cheap. People like to look at the top 2% of a console and proclaim that prices are out of control when you can still get at a large chunk of a library for a few bucks a game. From what I see, mostly people who don't buy retro games at all and emulate or use flash carts are the ones constantly complaining about prices.

>>3285689
I make pin compatible parts enclosed in a resin DIP that weigh the same as original ROMs. I even pad print the original label on them in case you want to open the cart. If an identical donor board is used to make the bootleg, er "repro" you won't be able to tell the difference.
There are ways to tell, even without opening the cart. But I'm not going to say how.

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Reproduction engineer here. I currently have an order for 100,000 original SNES cartridges coming in from China in a couple weeks. These were made with the original cartridge molds. Prepare for market saturation.

>>3286743
nice proofs nigga

>$70 in 1991 is $128 in 2016

Don't get me wrong, I miss the boxes of 1st-party Nintendo games for $5, but for the most part it's still cheaper than when it came out, the numbers just haven't changed much. We're on the low end of the spectrum in terms of money we shell out. We could be like /k/ommandos and buy a gun with whole paychecks every few weeks. Hobbies cost money, m8, regardless of which hobby. And with nothing new coming out that has me interested, I'd like to go back and play things I didn't get to as a poorfag child. Feels kinda good knowing I'm financially stable enough to be shelling out a little bit more for a good game. Do you guys think prices with simmer down in say 5 years? Or are we fucked?

>haven't collected anything in over 5 years
>kinda want to get back into it
>everything is overpriced and garage sales require extreme luck and patience
>feels worse than before

JUST

>>3275371
Film the entire unpacking, opening and verification.
Also, ebay will side with the seller out of caution 95% of the time, and even the most basic looking into a seller's inventory will tell that he is selling 10 new copies of media out of print for 20 years.

His "he switched the boards" argument will work an absolute maximum of one time.

>>3275645
I thought about buying reproductions of some games and a flashcart for the rest until I realised it's actually cheaper to buy one flashcart per game.

You can have it boot straight to the game, too, then just change the label.

>>3275348
>we'd rather pay our mortgage than pay ebay prices for games that are under $20 six years ago
>Implying it's one or the other.

If you don't want to pay outlandish prices for old plastic bullshit, that's your business, but please don't try to play the 'muh mortgage' card as if you're making an intelligent, adult decision to be fucked by a bank forever instead of indulge in a hobby.

>>3281186
they already snatcher kid

>>3287815
You sound angry that you'll be emulating in your parents basement until you're in your in your 40's. If you were an intelligent adult you'd know that interest rates are insanely low right now.

>>3286743
GL competing with those $10 aliexpress snes carts.