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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

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

Sorry for the loss but... why does he need to dump the cartridges again? Don't we have full SNES Romsets floating around the net?

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.

 

[depaul]

I admire the hard work you people put for the love of your old games. I never knew it was that hard..

 

[Sonic Angel Knight]

Well i mean i hope the clean rom of Mega man x doesn't have that dumb buggy copy protection. Watching people play that way is funny.

 

[YayMii]

I should be thankful for living in a city that's home to a shipping hub... I've ordered lots of things online (with all of my American imports usually going the USPS -> Canada Post route), and I've never had a package lost or stolen, not to mention that almost all of my deliveries make it on time or even early.

I've had some pretty sketchy deliveries though. One time I imported a mechanical keyboard from China, and it was delivered in an unmarked box, by some random Chinese dude in an unmarked car, who booked it as soon as he dropped it in front of our door. He didn't even ring the doorbell, and I live right in front of a bus stop, so there's a really good chance it would've been stolen if someone didn't see him leaving. That's the last time I'm ever using the "line deals" option when importing things (I swear, someone at the shipping agency must've just called up one of their cousins to deliver a package just to save money).

 

[DHall243]

Sounds to me like hes a whiny bitch, ive had packages take months to clear customs or move to another terminal that have come out of Japan and Germany, it took 3 months to get my Sky3ds+

 

[Minox]

Sounds to me like hes a whiny bitch, ive had packages take months to clear customs or move to another terminal that have come out of Japan and Germany, it took 3 months to get my Sky3ds+

Have you ever had something worth $10k sent to you and then never have it arrive? A Sky3DS+ is less than $100, that's an amount you could make in less than 1-2 days if you work. 10k however could take months or maybe even a few years depending on what other expenses you have.

 

[DHall243]

Have you ever had something worth $10k sent to you and then never have it arrive? A Sky3DS+ is less than $100, that's an amount you could make in less than 1-2 days if you work. 10k however could take months or maybe even a few years depending on what other expenses you have.

It doesn't matter if its $10 or $10000, Theres no point in just letting stuff only a month behind be considered lost or stolen when importing, and yes Ive had a $6000 engine take months to import from Japan.

On top of that, I don't see the total value of these games being worth that much unless they were CIB, There arent many games worth over $100, at at the rate that he says they were worth that would make each one worth $75-100 on average. Mind you, thats 100 games all worth $100 a pop. which is highly unlikely.

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

It doesn't matter if its $10 or $10000, Theres no point in just letting stuff only a month behind be considered lost or stolen when importing, and yes Ive had a $6000 engine take months to import from Japan.

On top of that, I don't see the total value of these games being worth that much unless they were CIB, There arent many games worth over $100, at at the rate that he says they were worth that would make each one worth $75-100 on average. Mind you, thats 100 games all worth $100 a pop. which is highly unlikely.

Except the package isn't in customs, it arrived at his local post office sort facility...and then disappeared for a couple weeks. It has nothing to do with "customs", it's simply "lost".

And these are very valuable PAL games, CIB. Rare PAL games can range anywhere from $700-$2000 each, depending on the game. PAL games are also a lot more "rare", since the SNES didn't exactly sell as well in the EU than it did other places.

 

[YayMii]

It doesn't matter if its $10 or $10000, Theres no point in just letting stuff only a month behind be considered lost or stolen when importing, and yes Ive had a $6000 engine take months to import from Japan.

Except it was lost/stolen. He received a trashed empty box with a note that pretty much read "sorry your package was damaged during shipping". This isn't simply a case of it not arriving on time.

 

[Saiyan Lusitano]

Why is there a purple SNES on the main page? This is a thread about the PAL SNES so it should be a PAL/JAPAN SNES being used.

Much nicer looking than the purple American SNES.

Except it was lost/stolen. He received a trashed empty box with a note that pretty much read "sorry your package was damaged during shipping". This isn't simply a case of it not arriving on time.

Don't they have cameras on the warehouses? Surely that would help to look into it.

 

[Minox]

It doesn't matter if its $10 or $10000, Theres no point in just letting stuff only a month behind be considered lost or stolen when importing, and yes Ive had a $6000 engine take months to import from Japan.

On top of that, I don't see the total value of these games being worth that much unless they were CIB, There arent many games worth over $100, at at the rate that he says they were worth that would make each one worth $75-100 on average. Mind you, thats 100 games all worth $100 a pop. which is highly unlikely.

Except this didn't get stuck in customs, it arrived without any of the things that were supposed to come with the packing label. And of course money matters. The more something costs the harder it is to replace it when said thing gets stolen/lost. Not to mention that new things are much more easily replaced than older rare things such as PAL SNES games.

 

[DarkGabbz]

Source: https://twitter.com/byuu_san/status/834842108330704896

 

[Imacaredformy2ds]

Source: https://twitter.com/byuu_san/status/834842108330704896

YOOOO THAT'S AMAZING
How did they even find them?

 

[Leeg]

UPDATE: Cartridges have been found:
https://twitter.com/byuu_san/status/834842108330704896
Already posted

Good.

 

[DarkGabbz]

nvm

 

[the_randomizer]

Ninja'd

Whoa, that was unexpected O.O

 

[osaka35]

huzzah! glad they were "found". Personally I wouldn't mind keeping the donation page up to contribute a bit to the process.

 

[DinohScene]

Welp, better then me prediction of it turning up a few years later.

Huzzah!

 

[Sliter]

nice it haven't been lost them xD

SO I'm the only unlucky here? arghhh XD

 

[DiscostewSM]

Guess the media is good for something, reporting on this so there's awareness.