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byuu, creator of the cycle-accurate SNES emulator higan and behind a preservation project for SNES games, has killed the project after a loss of 100 PAL games during shipping. While he still plans to dump the Japanese games that he bought, the hopes of getting a complete PAL set are gone.

On January 5th, a package containing 100 PAL games were sent to me to dump. The United States Postal Service has either stolen or lost this package. Most likely the former.

Do not tell me to wait longer. I don't want to fucking hear it. The package is gone and nobody can help. I don't want to ride on some platitude that "HERP DERP MAYBE ONE DAY THEY'LL SHOW UP!" They won't. There is no point in false hope, that's cruel to both me and the donor, and it will just delay reimbursement.

The next step is to try and obtain the insurance claim, and then I'm going to start making payments each paycheck to try and reimburse the sender until he is able to repuchase all 100 games locally. Or if he prefers, he can just keep the money that's equivalent to the value of the cartridges. I won't be purchasing the carts to be delievered to me, because I don't want to risk shipping them back.

I also want to be clear, the donor never asked for reimbursement upon loss. It was my decision and it's going to happen, because I can't live with myself if it doesn't.

Regardless, this much is certain: the SNES preservation project is officially and permanently dead.

This is a great loss to the emulation scene and its attempt at preserving the original systems accurately. Some people are suggesting byuu to set up a Patreon/GoFundMe and he seems okay with the idea if he can fully pay back for what was lost this time.

Source
byuu's overview


EDIT: Feb 23

It appears that the games have been recovered! The $10,000 collection of rare Super Nintendo games are no longer missing. According to the USPS, the games were actually lost, due to the label ripping off, rather than the rumors of package theft that had been floating around. Byuu, the person behind the project now says the SNES Preservation Project is no longer dead. In the linked blog post below, Byuu writes that had the media not covered this incident, these games would have sat in a facility for months, before ultimately winding up in an auction. There was a clear address on the box, even after the label had been damaged. He says while the project will continue on in the years to come, but he will never trust the postal service with larger shipments due to this issue.

My package was sitting in Atlanta, GA for well over a month with my address clearly visible right on the box. Had this case not been escalated to the media, it likely would have gone up for auction in a bin with other electronics sometime in March. As absolutely thrilled as I am to have these games finally delivered, I do still believe the entire experience reflects poorly on the capabilities of the USPS. I hope that they will improve, but ... I'm guessing that's not likely.

If you donated to his Patreon to help recover the cost of the lost games, Byuu is offering a full refund.

SOURCE

 

[DJPlace]

my UPSP is freaking sweet i ship stuff without bubbles and everything turns out fine. but i shipped out a PS3 to get fix in MA i hope there service is good or i'm going be PISSED.

 

[BlueFox gui]

this sucks dude

 

[Sonic Angel Knight]

For sorting boxes, most of the time management/supervisors want it done in a certain time period. So, you end up throwing the boxes onto a pallet, line, whatever you use, thus breaks in the process. Tis why I never will buy a TV from work. Plus could come broken during shipment to store because Distribution fucked up. I don't know if that's the case with USPS, FedEx and UPS. I work in the back and handle fragile stuff with care.

You sound like you work for delivery company.

 

[Sketchy1]

id completley belive they were stolen. think- 10k worth of cartridges, just poof.

worker sees even 1 cart, and hes like, mine now b*tches!!!
leave it to postage to steal your shit though.

 

[BORTZ]

Man I big part of me hurts now and I didn't even know this was an ongoing project.
If I wear my mask, no one can see me cry. Better wear 2 just in case

 

[Sheimi]

You sound like you work for delivery company.

I work in retail and management's punching bag.

 

[lincruste]

Lost ? How do you lose 100 fucking SNES gamepacks ? It's robbery for sure.

 

[ww97]

Is byuu the same guy as Cifaldi/Callis, who were working for dumping BS-X (Satellaview) games?

 

[Sonic Angel Knight]

Is byuu the same guy as Cifaldi/Callis, who were working for dumping BS-X (Satellaview) games?

I wonder if i can play the smb3 BSX rom, i dunno why some roms don't work when i try, is it time based or something?

I work in retail and management's punching bag.

I don't quite get it, like the sandbag from super smash bros? Anyway, i just mean that there is some awful stuff going on with USPS, and then how do they stay in business? The boss at usps can just go to youtube for tons of videos about them and find how the people working been treating these deliveries.

 

[Jack Daniels]

what is so special about the roms, the names of the roms he descriped as being special, i allready had, they are not that unique, it's been haced even so...
but the manuals and all... i'd help if i could get them... i won't donate, but if he's more specefic about what's missing, we could all get it together... i'm pretty sure that we can contribute to his collection, just i'd scan it myself and send the copy for archive as long as it's legal...

 

[Xzi]

I definitely wouldn't order 100 games to be shipped by USPS.

 

[Boured]

God dammit.


That is all...

 

[endoverend]

So are these rare games that were never dumped before? Or just never dumped with this specific setup?

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

So are these rare games that were never dumped before? Or just never dumped with this specific setup?

Pretty much all SNES games have already been dumped, the main goal of this project however was to obtain totally clean dumps. You can actually read more about it on byuu's site, here's a quote that actually explains why he wants to create new clean dumps of these games:

Aren't there already ROM dumps out there of every SNES game?

Yes and no.

First, there are many revisions of games that are undiscovered. Upon dumping my USA collection, I found two new game revisions. One for "The Death and Return of Superman", and one for "Ken Griffey Jr Presents Major League Baseball."
What is a revision? Sometimes a game publisher will release a game, and then discover a serious bug in the game and will fix it. They then release new cartridges, but these are not labeled. You often can't tell which revision you have unless you take the game apart and read the serial numbers off of the ROM chips.

Second, there are bad dumps out there. There are many reasons for these. One is that games were often patched to remove anti-copier protections. These often do serious things like slow games down by up to 25% of their original speed (though usually it's not that drastic), because the oldest copiers did not have RAM with fast access speeds inside of them. Another is that due to the use of floppy disks, bits would get flipped occasionally. The third would be from older piracy groups adding "trainers" (advertisements upon booting the game, often with the ability to apply cheats to the game from an onscreen menu), and sometimes people would remove these trainers rather than redumping the games. The fourth would be header changes to make games run in emulators with poor heuristics. And the fifth and least likely would be malicious changes: people putting their names into the game images for bragging rights. Most notably here would be Diskdude and Vimm's Lair.

In the first batch of 100 PAL games I dumped, I found two games with bit corruption. The first was Spider-Man & Venom, where the main Spider-Man sprite was partially corrupted. The second was Fatal Fury 2, where one of the fighter sprite frames was partially corrupted. What's so damning about this is that both of these games were marked as "verified" in GoodSNES, which for many was considered a gold standard that the games were 100% bit-perfect copies.
A friend, KingMike, has found a half-dozen bad dumps of Japanese games from his own collection so far.
It's important to note that the USA set is easily the most dumped set there is. The PAL and Japan sets are not dumped nearly as often. Dumping the PAL set is thus of great importance.

 

[BORTZ]

Pretty much all SNES games have already been dumped, the main goal of this project however was to obtain totally clean dumps. You can actually read more about it on byuu's site, here's a quote that actually explains why he wants to create new clean dumps of these games:

I didnt know that. I feel a little better now.

 

[gman666]

The preservation of this kind is very important. We have to preserve these games before time wrecks havoc on the bits. Hopefully, he finds the package and all the games are dumped.

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

I didnt know that. I feel a little better now.

Yeah, this isn't necessarily a "major" loss in that there are SNES games we're never going to see again. The main loss is that, unless someone else spots him copies of those extremely expensive games, we'll likely not see 100% verified, totally clean dumps for them.

Though I don't think it's fair to say the entire project is "dead". byuu himself has said in his overview that, if DHL will pay out the insurance to the lender, he may continue the project at some point in the future.

 

[Cylent1]

The post office lost my gps I sent to my wife so she knew how to get home from a trip.
It did have a $50 insurance claim that I filed the paperwork for, then low and behold they lost the paperwork a month later and ironically the tracking number was taken off their site. Moral of the story is... Never trust a government entity. Use ups or fedex.

 

[Saiyan Lusitano]

SEE! Told you USPS is awful. I been saying that for months.

A few years ago I worked on UPS' warehouse and I was shocked by the condition of packages and they'd throw them around. For example, a box of wine bottles was completely broken, a HDTV box ripped and other packages had similar disastrous defects too. This just killed my spirit from going back there.

 

[fatsquirrel]

USPS is a joke. Thats all there is to say.
From pricing to actual handling of items.
A joke.