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In Pursuit of the Pink Panther Rom?


classicgamer74

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Someone was going to do a repro run and then he vanished. The Power Lords rom is available, but not the Pink Panther. I wish I had a chance to pick one up from CPUWIZ. The games he helped make have great boxes and are top quality.

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Ya, I was on the shortlist for the repro cart and that guy disappeared as fast as the Coleco Chameleon.

Yeah so disappointed with the guy that bailed on this. I was one of the first to sign up and desperately wanting a copy of this. Guess there's not much hope of that now.

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Yeah so disappointed with the guy that bailed on this. I was one of the first to sign up and desperately wanting a copy of this. Guess there's not much hope of that now.

 

Me, too. May have been the posting vs PMing for the ten spots controversy that scared him off. Maybe he just wanted to torture us. Or maybe some clandestine group of fanatical collectors told him it would devalue his original. (Only the first seems likely, I hope).

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Swami,I don't know why some collectors think that having a rom made would devalue the cartridge. I still see Elis Ladder and Red Sea Ceossing going for thousands and their rooms are readily available. I'm going to do a YouTube episode on rare games later on. I found some video footage of the Pink Panther. I was just wanting to play it myself as I loved those cartoons as I kind and still do. The reboot series on YouTube is a scream.

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Shawn, how is that? Is there something special about the cartridge?

I believe the prototype has some weird resistor pack in the cart. Probably for the extra RAM it used. I'm not a hardware guy so I don't know much more than that. I know it was hard to dump.

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I am sure Stella would be adapted very soon.

 

I sure it would be. I was more or less posting that information to get people to stop asking for something that the owners just don't want to give. Some part of it has to do with possible legal ramifications also.

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...I don't know why some collectors think that having a rom made would devalue the cartridge. I still see Elis Ladder and Red Sea Ceossing going for thousands and their rooms are readily available.

And yet right there is the answer to your own question.

No matter how many times this topic comes up, nobody ever seems to get it. And its mainly because nobody ever explains it properly. The very examples that you yourself named in your post of Elis Ladder & Red Sea Crossing are RELEASED games. Extremely rare & very limited releases? YES. But nonetheless, RELEASED. PERIOD! Pink Panther is an UNRELEASED game. PERIOD! Apples & Oranges.

 

YES, it is true, that the perceived value of a released game is only SLIGHTLY affected by the accessibility of its rom data and/or the availability of reproductions. High end collectors will ALWAYS want an original & will NEVER settle for a copy.

 

However, the perceived value of an UNRELEASED game is SEVERELY affected by the status of its rom data. And anyone who doesnt believe this, has never had a horse in the race. Because if they ever did, they would then realize this VERY quickly!

 

...oh yeah man, lotto winners are such selfish jerks man. If I won the lotto, I would totally just share all my winnings with the rest of the world man... - Yeah. Sure pal. Until you actually win.

 

And for the tenth time in the tenth thread here about Pink Panther, its already been dumped. And it already had a small reproduction run. So NONE of this even applies. Anyone still hanging onto an original proto has had more then enough time to toss that hot potato so if they havent by now, its 100% by their own decision. And yes, it has unique architecture which makes it hard to reproduce, but it was done on Melody, which means it works with Harmony, which means a patched emulator would work as well. Etc. So the holding pattern that Pink Panther is in most likely relates to some legal entanglement. It sure as hell is no longer technical limitation, and it sure as hell is no longer worth anything close to what it once was.

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Get me the equipment and an emulator that it'll work with and it's yours...

 

I took it to Sean Kelly back in 2009 or 2010 to see if the ROM was able to be dumped... And it was not.

 

If there is a new solution, it'd good to hear about that.

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I see your point, Supergun. To be honest, I would just like to play it. Just once. I grew up watching that cartoon with my dad, laughing out heads off. And playing Combat, so in some ways it's kind of a nostalgic thing.

I did find a homebrew version of Birthday Mania online a few months back. It was kind of cool to play one of the rarest 2600 games in existence. Not the greatest game but...

But like you said, apples and oranges. Still I would love to play it just once or you know spend a few hours playing it.

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Get me the equipment and an emulator that it'll work with and it's yours...

 

I took it to Sean Kelly back in 2009 or 2010 to see if the ROM was able to be dumped... And it was not.

 

If there is a new solution, it'd good to hear about that.

The rom has been dumped for sure, otherwise repro carts couldn't have been made. However I think the hold up is that one of the proto owners (I assume whichever one allowed theirs to be dumped) has to release the rom or give permission for it be released. Of course that doesn't make it legal as far as copyrights are concerned, but I don't think that is the hold up.

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People should be thanking Tempest for putting pics on his site and explaining the mechanics of the game. At least (thanks to his hard work) we can see and understand how the game was suppossed to be played. It did have a very limited run and very few were able to play it but as stated we know what it looked like and how it played. I just wish that those still held fabled prototypes would offer Tempest some pics and information so he could put them on his site whilst offering full anominity as to who owned them so they would not be pestered. That way it would be confirmed that the game in question existed and we would all share what they looked like and how they played. Sometimes reading about a game is far more satisfying than actually playing it.

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It's so frustrating when cool, interesting games like this get stuck in limbo because of plain old unfortunate circumstances. This happens more than most of you probably think too, there are dozens of games from the dawn of 3D-capable consoles onward (some of them finished and ready to go) that may never be released thanks to copyrights and/or lack of a functional framework to run it outside of the devkit environment. And those are just the ones we know about from dev interviews and press releases, there are probably many more that were never mentioned publicly and are just sitting on hard drives, awaiting the day when mechanical failure erases them completely. I think the reason Atari games (and other pre-NES formats) are so well preserved and widely available is because of much looser/nonexistent copy protection at the time as well as many of the copyright holders having since closed down and allowing their copyrights to lapse. Pink Panther, of course, being an exception thanks to the licensed property. Games from the current era are going to be much, much harder to deal with thanks to all of the persistent online elements, DRM methods, closely-held copyrights, and incredibly complex hardware configurations that will require huge amounts of processing power to recreate in software. Emulating the SNES accurately is notoriously difficult, image how punishingly hard 1:1 emulation of the PS3 is going to be.

 

I'll bet in 20 years, the idea of the biggest obstacle to making a prototype available to the public being a few collectors shuffling their feet will seem downright quaint. Imagine if somebody got ahold of the OG Xbox version of Perfect Dark Zero, or one of Ubisoft's scrapped Wii U projects. Getting them running will be one thing, getting them into the hands of the public will be a whole other kettle of fish.

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Totally, agree. I have an episode on the horizon all about prototypes and unreleased 2600 games. I did one recently on Planet of the Apes and I think it's sad that it didn't get released. Tempest was right about Alligator People, too. I played that game for hours a few days ago! Talk about a lost treasure!

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