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Only English Final Fantasy 2 NES Cartridge On Sale for $50K
Croakyvoice writes "In what seems to be the 'in thing' at the moment comes another auction to add to last month's Zelda NES auction and that crazy million dollar collection. This time, for RPG fans, this could be classed as the Holy Grail of NES games. The game in question is Final Fantasy 2, which was never released outside of Japan, but luckily for the person who at this time is selling this on eBay for 50K, there was one made for the 1991 Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas by SquareSoft. Sadly, the U.S. version never had a release because they decided to work on the Super NES instead."
Before Square burnt up every bit of affection the general public had for the name "Final Fantasy".
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
.... makes me think FF2 might not be far behind.
which is droid so....
I never really understood why these development cartridges fetch such high prices. Well, on a superficial level, I understand since it's a matter of supply and demand. But at a deeper level, it's a one off because it's an unfinished product. To me, I don't see any difference between a free fan-based english conversion vs an official "never sold to the public" version.
Would you pay millions of dollars for a test version of Windows 98 developed for esperanto? The answer is no, because nobody cares. However, the same logic doesn't apply when it comes to toys and games
It was FF4 that was released as FF2 in the US.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Considering how rare it is, I doubt it.
Yes. The person auctioning the cart dumped it himself. (It's Frank Cifaldi, who's a pretty well-known video game historian and journalist.) While doing so kills the market value, Frank Cifaldi believes more highly in the preservation of prototypes and betas than in maintaining the value by letting a cartridge languish in a box and degrade.
I believe his site, Lost Levels (lostlevels.org) in fact offers the ROM for download for preservation purposes.
The translation is kind of rough, but I suppose we shouldn't be surprised.
You're trying to be funny, right?
50k is his asking price. As anyone who's watched Pawn Stars knows, there's usually a big difference between what people ask for and what they end up getting.
That's right folks, it's a crime! Don't copy that floppy, don't copy that ROM! You're only paying for the physical media, and once it wears out, it's gone.
It's authentic.
FC Closer
They did. IT was on display at CES. The translation features Nintedoisms like censoring the religious symbology and so forth.
It's Frank Cifaldi. The dump's authentic.
Now Bio Force Ape... That's going to be one hell of a sale.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I have this copyrighted chocolate chip cookie recipe. It's the only copy written in English. Because you know it's not possible to make another copy of it.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Um, they did.
http://www.lostlevels.org/200312/200312-ffan2.shtml
With enough searching I believe you should be able to find screenshots and such from the game.
http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/17wkpxma1zym7jpg/original.jpg is an image of part of an ad that ran before its release.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
A screenshot of the game shows the status screen for a character that has been killed. It simply reads: "GUY DEAD"
I seem to remember some of these existing in the wild on emulators quite a long time ago. There was a patch which could be run against the dumped ROM to translate most of the dialog etc. Some things that were actually graphics rather than text still retained Japanese letters/characters, but the character dialog was surprisingly well done.
I bet that would fetch a zillion dollars... Hell the Chalice of Lightwould probably fetch a mint at auction, millions perhaps?
I believe his site, Lost Levels (lostlevels.org) in fact offers the ROM for download for preservation purposes.
There's a link, but it's a dead-end redirect =\
10 dollars says it's the US fan-made translation patch that some idiot programmed onto EPROMs and is passing it off as a "rare prototype".
While that's possible, in general, there exist ways to determine whether a game has been translated by force. Because of the lack of the original source code, many of the changes to the existing code will be done as branches to other areas of ROM.
If you change the size of a block of assembly code, you have to adjust pointers throughout that segment and beyond. This is the task of an assembler and linker, working on your source code. For ROM hacking, you don't have the source. It's infeasible--and provably uncomputable in the general case--to know where all these pointers are, so that you can adjust them when you rebuild with hacks in place.
Thus, patched ROMs are made by placing branches in one part of the code pointing at some previously unused area, then jumping back after finishing whatever needed to happen there. These jumps can be detected in a thorough analysis of a given ROM image in comparison to its Japanese original. If it is clear that the code adjustments made for the English version were made by reassembling from source, the probability that it is a translation from the original author is very high.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Someone launch a Kickstarter project to buy this then put the ROMs out for the rest of the world to use on emulators.
"In what seems to be the in thing at the moment
Bit of a clunky opening. I'd hyphenate "in-thing" so it parses more easily.
last months
Jesus, really?
Zelda Nes auction
That would be "NES". And was it a NES that was sold, or a NES game?
and that crazy Million Dollar Collection.
Oh yeah, that! Wait, what?
This time for RPG fans this could be classed as the Holy Grail of Nes [sic] games.
This could be classed as the Holy Grail of NES games for RPG fans.
The game in question is Final Fantasy 2 which was never released outside of Japan but luckily for the person who at this time is selling this on Ebay for 50K, there was one made for the 1991 Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas by SquareSoft, sadly the USA version never had a release because they decided to work on the Super NES instead."
65 words. Two commas.
on Ebay for 50K
Another example of the headline having more information than the summary - that's in $. But is it 50 kilo-dollars or 50 kibi-dollars?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
If you change the size of a block of assembly code, you have to adjust pointers throughout that segment and beyond. This is the task of an assembler and linker, working on your source code. For ROM hacking, you don't have the source. It's infeasible--and provably uncomputable in the general case--to know where all these pointers are, so that you can adjust them when you rebuild with hacks in place.
It is possible, but it's a lot of work, and it grows with the size of the code. First you have to start with a disassembler that traces down branches and calls, then you have to keep looking for more code that didn't get traced because it was referenced from a jump table somewhere, and tell the disassembler to search that too.
It also depends on the instruction set of the CPU, and how pointers get represented in memory. In 6502 code, each byte of a data record is often put in separate tables, and jump tables that use PHA/PHA/RTS will use the address - 1 because of the way RTS works.
But in my experience, the hard work is data blocks with pointers to other blocks that contain even more pointers. When the code is in assembly language, a lot more liberties can be taken with data formats than would be done in C code. Sometimes the only way to be sure is to find the code that accesses the tables, and identify which offsets contain addresses under which conditions.
It's one thing to do this to an arcade-style game that's 16K bytes. It's completely different trying to do this to an RPG of a few hundred K bytes. I've done the former, but never had the guts to try the latter.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
What is interesting though, would FF2 still sell, if it was available for, let's say 1€? Should game publishers put their past catalogue on sale, bundled with proper emulators to support them? I'm just asking a neutral question. In a way this is already happening at GOG.com.
FTFAuction:
Q: Can you please upload to ROM online, so the world can play it? There is no way publisher will release this, and if you don't it could be lost to time: Forever.
A: OK, I did it (9 years ago).
So, it looks like he dumped and uploaded the ROM as soon as he acquired the cart.
Rather than spending $50K on a NES cartridge, you could just go to the iPhone app store and buy Final Fantasy II for 8.99$.
Just sayin'.