SNES Preservation Project "Dead" after USPS Loses $10K of Cartridges

what was the point of his endeavour?

to copy the original game or make roms of each game?
 
Maybe this is a good thing. I know we all have a gaming backlog. At least I do and I have a hard time finding the time to work on clearing it out . This guy would of never got through them all!
 
Dr. Righteous said:
Yeah, but fast food joints and car dealer are not supported by tax dollars.
And worthless government employees are protected by the largest labor union in the country.
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The post office hasn't taken tax dollars since the mid 80's. Thirty years, and people still insist it is true because government.
Worthless employees and Good employees are both protected by one of the last decent unions that still exist in the US.
 
My life's work SNES collection is about a hundo carts. This is awful news, even if there's something fishy going on.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
then complain to your local post office because i'm sure your street isn't the only one their screwing up so the more complaints they receive the fast they can get rid of the courier.
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There have been many, many complaints by all my neighbors. The "carrier" (in this case, "Driver") is an older large black man about as pleasant as a junk yard dog. I've been nice to him and said hello, etc. nothing but grunts in return. He will not get out of his jeep (van/whatever the hell they call the USPS vehicles nowadays) unless he is forced to deliver a package.... then said package MIGHT make somewhere near my porch before it is dropped. If there is a car anywhere near my mailbox, I don't get mail. I was having some work done to my house, and the contractors were parked out front a lot... I went weeks without mail. I told the contractors not to park in front of the mailbox... one of them approached the dude as he drove past it one day. He said "this is a "mounted route", I don't get out unless I have a package. This dude likely cannot be fired unless he runs over and kills someone.

The USPS is filled to the brim with dudes like this. People that have worked there forever and day and know they cannot be fired. It's amazing anything actually arrives ever.

The USPS should "retire" everyone who's been there over 20 years (maybe 10? too harsh?) and hire all new staff. Or just give up and close the doors. I'm sure Fedex or UPS could come up with something.

* = before I get flamed to death, I said "retire" not "fire". These people all have fully funded pensions, they should start enjoying retirement. Starting tomorrow. You notice that even Amazon has largely stopped using them, it's somehow cheaper to hire your own people and buy new vans for delivery. Amazing.
 
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So, not even taking into account the Gub'ment mail failues, and looking at this as a simple logistics issue. Wouldn't it have been easier, faster and cheaper to just send the collector the hardware to dump the roms?
 
Maxx said:
Quite right. I once bought a used laptop, repaired it, upgraded it, and cleaned it, to send it as a gift. I got insurance that was below the actual value I put into it with both upgrades and time, and I had plenty of pictures before and after. For whatever reason the person delivering the package went out their way to destroy it - a grudge against someone who turned out not to be living at the destination, as it turned out. In any case, I wasn't able to get a dime back even with weeks of dealing with the claim. Long story short, I still always get insurance and do due diligence with it, but I generally expect to get nothing out of it.
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I'm curious what the insurance company's excuse was for not paying out.
 
The problem with USPS has less to do with bureaucracy and more to do with a lack of an accurate and timely package tracking system.
If you scan the package every time someone touches it (and not just when it's convenient), it's a lot harder to lose, and a lot easier to find if it does get lost.
 
Master_shake_ said:
what was the point of his endeavour?

to copy the original game or make roms of each game?
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To make "perfect" copies from the originals.

https://snescentral.com/article.php?id=0995

To go along with his perfectionist SNES emulator, which needs a supercomputer to run, and I really can't tell the difference, despite wasting all those cycles.

This assumes the carts themselves don't have any bitrot.

I'm sure all these carts have been dumped before, just not with his more exacting tools with error correction. And if the rips are functional, I'm not sure a bit-perfect re-rip is that important. But try telling that to a rabid perfectionist?

Hey, maybe next time Mr. Perfectionist will just take his ripper to the collection?
 
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Dr. Righteous said:
And worthless government employees are protected by the largest labor union in the country.
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Thats an overly broad statement. You do realise that only about 34% of federal employees are actually covered by a union right?
 
xaustinx said:
as was found when comparing the cart dumps he already did for the 721 USA/CA/MX carts, a good portion of the rom dumps out there don't match the originals. As it states in the article

"As our own Chris Bratt found out when investigating Nintendo's own Virtual Console service, many of the pirated SNES ROMs available online are not true copies of the game - they've been edited in some way. Not even Nintendo has the original digital images of all these games - which is how copied games find their way onto Nintendo's own store."
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Eveytime I read about nintendo with regards to the internet and their presense on it, all I can do is shake my head and weep. Please nintendo. Please learn about the internet and how awesome it is. Insane that they download roms from emu paradise instead of copying the own games that they own from their own carts to a rom file. Absolutely insane.
 
The place I live now has no mailbox. It's an apartment building. I was given a free PO box since I have no mailbox.

Shipping has been a bit of a nightmare but now it's mostly figured out.

If it's being sent via USPS, then I have to address it to my PO box.

If it's being sent by FedEX or UPS then I have to address it to my physical address.

Sometimes websites won't tell you what their shipping method is.

So in cases like that I have to call them and find out or if I can't find out I have to put both addresses on the form.

I used to just ship everything to my PO box but apparently if you address fedex and ups stuff there they just send it back.

According to the guy above USPS uses their own sorting centers to sort FedEX and UPS but I guess they can't put them in a po box, cost them too much labor I guess.

I've had FedEX not be able to find my apartment. Or just leave expensive computer parts on the street in front of the door.

I just would think that if you didn't have a mailbox and so according to some convenience law USPS gives me a PO box for free, in my mind that makes up for not having a mailbox so all my mail should go there right? Wrong. Only USPS mail can go there. Doesn't matter if I don't have a mailbox, doesn't matter if I don't know what method it's going to be shipped under.

I had the lady at the post office tell me to put both addresses on my mail just to make sure it gets somewhere and not returned. I then after receiving mail like that she told me not to label them like that. :-: halp pls halp

I'm ready for amazon drones to track my phone and bring packages directly to me :D Even if I'm on the highway

"Oh shit my SSD is here, roll down the window."
 
I cannot say I am surprised. USPS has lost one of my packages containing a iPhone screen. They have also lost packages from some of my work mates from Amazon.
 
brentsg said:
Even with insurance good luck proving value on collector goods after a loss.

My recent USPS experiences have been similar. For a couple of months around Christmas, anything that looked like it might have a valuable item in it disappeared. Gift cards, birthday cards with checks in them, tickets to events, etc all just vanished. Luckily it wasn't anything that couldn't be replaced.
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Your experience sounds like it's similar to what I went through getting mail in the 30339 Zip code. We had the WORST carrier station in the entire USPS system based on statistics. Stuff would be scanned as delivered but never show up, and the supervisor would refuse to provide any information regarding the GPS location it was scanned at. Mail routinely got stolen, not delivered, returned to sender for no obvious reason. And USPS has never honored any insurance claims I have made.
 
Delicieuxz said:
Instead of reimbursing the donor 10K $ USD, the person who does the backups should rebuy all of the cartridges that went missing to send back to them, and back them up as they planned, before sending them back - this time with insurance for the full trip. The cost of rebuying 100 cartridges is going to be less than 10K. There are stores that still stock large amounts of SNES games. There's one that's local to me, that has probably over 300 in stock right now.
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You obviously have no idea what you're talking about... These were European carts, and some of them were quite rare. For an idea of how much they cost, just try looking on ebay! I honestly think even $10k may be on the low end due to the work that will be required to reacquire them all.
 
Calling Byuu an "amateur archivist" is quite the insult in my opinion! The guy has built the most exact emulator ever (even if it does struggle performance wise), decapped and extracted the firmware from all the enhancement chips, built his own dumping hardware and software, and has probably contributed more toward the SNES preservation than anyone else out there (even Nintendo). I know that statement comes from the article, but still... At what point is someone an expert instead of an amateur?
 
Delicieuxz said:
Instead of reimbursing the donor 10K $ USD, the person who does the backups should rebuy all of the cartridges that went missing to send back to them, and back them up as they planned, before sending them back - this time with insurance for the full trip. The cost of rebuying 100 cartridges is going to be less than 10K. There are stores that still stock large amounts of SNES games. There's one that's local to me, that has probably over 300 in stock right now.
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LOL...you're missing the entire point. You realize they were valued at 10k because they are very rare, non-US, SNES games, right?

Oh sure, walk right into a local vintage game store and pay a couple a bucks to buy them back...

If there are enough people serious about this cause, it may make more sense to GoFundByuu a trip out to Europe so he can archive these on site. I mean...assuming he is a natural born US citizen that bears no resemblance whatsoever to any non-white ethnicity this would be the safest route to go.
 
"USPS" ... "$10K package" ... "lost"

One of my $$$$ newegg purchases went missing. Was found in the carrier's personal vehicle. There was a new postman on our route starting the next week.
 
Delicieuxz said:
I didn't see the part that said they were EU-only games.

You don't even know what the games are.

For the lost 100 games to be worth 10K, they would have to hold an average value of $100 USD per game. Now, I just looked up a list of SNES games released only in Europe, and then searched eBay for a random 6 of the games on the list. There were MANY used copies available of each of them, and their general prices were: $14, $37, $10.55, $7.30, $12, $12.

Clearly, rebuying 100 EU SNES games is going to not even cost $5K. I'd guess that it might cost $2-3K USD, giving the games an average value of $20, and allowing for shipping costs.

It makes sense that the games would be expensive to buy up, because if an EU SNES game was good enough that it was popular or would be very in-demand, it probably would've been released in the larger markets (Japan: 17.7 million SNES consoles, Americas: 23 million consoles, Europe: 8.9 million consoles).



Anyway, Byuu made a post asking if people who owned the games were willing to donate them. Obviously he doesn't expect them to be so rare that nobody reading the post doesn't possess them, and it seems pretty clear that there is no shortage of people offloading EU SNES games for very low prices.
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Actually, He did mention a few of the games, here's what I found on ebay:
Vampire's Kiss: $190
Hagane: $125
Megaman X: $79
Megaman X2: None available, cheapest recent sale was $232
Megaman X3: $845!!!

As you can see, many of these are crazy expensive and very overpriced.
 
xaustinx said:
It bothers me that so many comments are "he should have purchased insurance! Duh! What a dumbass!" It clearly states in the article "The sender had insurance..." It's almost as if nobody bothered to read the full article in favor of just making snarky comments about how stupid people are. The guy dumping the roms, Byuu: wrote one of the best SNES emulators, completed the preservation projects as it relates to ALL 721 USA/CA/MX games (and sold the collection he personally amassed for $25k), and I believe was just trying to get a dump of all the european/japanese/etc games. I wouldn't consider him an idiot right off the bat. The European collector was limiting the number of carts to 100 at a time, limiting the potential loss if something unexpected were to happen (the USPS having employees that would steal packages is unexpected).

This is a problem inherent with shipping goods internationally; and why a huge portions of ebay sellers don't sell internationally. Unless both countries are on a very *VERY* short list that provides insurance for 100% of the journey, then the best you can do is insure your 1/2 of the journey and cross your fingers for the rest. A couple years ago eBay made this a bit easier by creating their own list, partnering with a shipping depot company, and providing seller and buyer protection against loss (i.e. insurance) so it's easier (although still not "easy" the process for filing a claim and getting funds for said claim can take months, countries get delisted, etc.) but not foolproof.
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What am I looking at (the preservation stuff)?
 
I still don't get it. Why is this "preservation project" better than normal ROM dumps?
 
Ocellaris said:
I still don't get it. Why is this "preservation project" better than normal ROM dumps?
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He has found several carts that had bad dumps, and in at least one case he found a dump that was (slightly) corrupt but someone had used a tool to fix the CRC in the header to make it look like it's right!
There's a lot more information about both the mail loss and his reason for redumping everything here: https://byuu.org/emulation/preservation/lost-package/
 
I see where they went wrong, when the sender sent the package, he declared it at 1000 euro, making it an instant target. Should have flown over there, and hand carried them.
 
xorbe said:
I see where they went wrong, when the sender sent the package, he declared it at 1000 euro, making it an instant target. Should have flown over there, and hand carried them.
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Cool, that's all the package was worth then.
 
Ocellaris said:
Cool, that's all the package was worth then.
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It is very common to declare much lower value than the item actually is. It is best if customs believes it is worthless, but not too low to arouse suspicions
 
Darunion said:
It is very common to declare much lower value than the item actually is. It is best if customs believes it is worthless, but not too low to arouse suspicions
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Sure if you can afford to lose the contents and value of the package.
 
DracoDan said:
He has found several carts that had bad dumps, and in at least one case he found a dump that was (slightly) corrupt but someone had used a tool to fix the CRC in the header to make it look like it's right!
There's a lot more information about both the mail loss and his reason for redumping everything here: https://byuu.org/emulation/preservation/lost-package/
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Adding to this, there is a LOT of PAL ROMs that are actually US and Japanese ROMs that were modified to run slower to be compatible. And because they've been around forever they are accepted as good
 
voklskier4452 said:
There is an update on this story:
https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/5uckkd/100_snes_pal_game_shipment_update_package_was/?st=iz8e73zh&sh=fe1b2dd1

Byuu seems to think the package was stolen, he received a letter from USPS apologizing for damage that only contained the shipping label and some wrapping.
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Wow! "Machine Ate it?" That is quite epic bullshit. If that machine is capable of destroying 10000$ worth of Snes cartridges (thats a big pile cartridges btw, and none survived?) made from sturdy plastic then that is a monster machine you got there just for moving packages around. He should get police involved.
 
So what was the reason for non-delivery? That didn't seem to make it into the story. His USPS contact probably asked him not to mention because there was probably nothing wrong with the box.

Back in the early '00s I was deep into FSFT, many packages being sent. One person sent me a processor that never arrived. He paid me back. Several months later I was at the post office doing something else and the person noticed my name and said "I'll be right back..." Came back with my processor. Been sitting on a shelf, with a perfectly readable destination address.
 
Silentbob343 said:
I like how the reddit poster believed that a postal worker stole 100 PAL SNES games.
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usually you the most you see is some one stealing undelivered coupons or magazines, thats about it given it's a federal crime to steal mail. (there i worded it better for you master shake, happy now?)

but yeah i always wondered what happened to packages that were deliverable, asked a few times after i saw this article at work and none of the managers had any clue where they went.. now i know.

TwiceOver said:
So what was the reason for non-delivery? That didn't seem to make it into the story. His USPS contact probably asked him not to mention because there was probably nothing wrong with the box.

Back in the early '00s I was deep into FSFT, many packages being sent. One person sent me a processor that never arrived. He paid me back. Several months later I was at the post office doing something else and the person noticed my name and said "I'll be right back..." Came back with my processor. Been sitting on a shelf, with a perfectly readable destination address.
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lol either that's lucky or unlucky as hell since they're not suppose to hold them for more than 7 days.. wonder if the shipper screwed up sent it has a pickup although i don't think i've ever seen that expect with international shipping.

but gut feeling on his being undelivered is that the shipping label was damaged some how or some one couldn't read his handwriting if he hand wrote the addresses on the box(please people if you send boxes and write the address on the box use legible block letters/numbers and not your normal handwriting!)

glad the box was found and you found your undelivered processor.
 
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Dr. Righteous said:
Yeah, but fast food joints and car dealer are not supported by tax dollars.
And worthless government employees are protected by the largest labor union in the country.
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Like hell they aren't.

Shit my old man ran a sheet metal construction business for over 30 years and the city took his shop, eminent domain, for a new highway bypass. They didn't actually pay him enough to build a new building for his business so he was screwed. Another city about 20 miles away had a large building they had seizes over unpaid taxes and they gave it to him if he would open his shop there. Private businesses get bumps with tax payer money all the time.

And those worthless government employees?

I know, you weren't talking about these guys (y)

20060523141424_cambridge.jpg
 
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TwiceOver said:
So what was the reason for non-delivery? That didn't seem to make it into the story. His USPS contact probably asked him not to mention because there was probably nothing wrong with the box.

Back in the early '00s I was deep into FSFT, many packages being sent. One person sent me a processor that never arrived. He paid me back. Several months later I was at the post office doing something else and the person noticed my name and said "I'll be right back..." Came back with my processor. Been sitting on a shelf, with a perfectly readable destination address.
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The label got torn off, I think.
 
It was wrapped in brown paper (not sure why people still do that for shipping packages).
 
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