MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: So what's the Holy Grail in terms of undumped game now...

I would have to say "Bouncer." But there are a large number of other games out there that various people are fervently hoping will be dumped someday:

- Atari's protos "Danger Express," as Phil has mentioned, and "Akka Arrh" (among others);

- Arcadia's "Aaargh!";

- Shinkai's "Eek!", one of the last remaining undumped original games on "Pac-Man" hardware;

- Stern's "Journey";

- Sente's "Moonquake";

- the Capcom CPS-2 proto "Galum Pa!";

- Data East's "Mole Hunter" and any of the remaining DECO cassettes that can be rescued before they go bad;

- PSE's "Desert Patrol";

- Susilu's "Ms. Pac-Man Twin";

- Sunsoft's proto "Punky Doodle" (which, despite all my efforts to get one of the co-creators to dump it, is still to my knowledge moldering away undumped in a storage unit somewhere in California);

- and pretty much any of the remaining undumped original games from the 70s and early 80s by Sega, Irem, Nichibutsu, and (especially) Taito.

There is of course also the never-released "Ms. Gorf," which I still have faint hope will be recompiled and reconstructed someday, and gregf's beloved EM shooter "Wild Gunman" by Nintendo, whose reels and electronics, etc., need to be preserved. Unfortunately, as time has gone on, copies of undumped games have become ever harder to locate, and when they do turn up, all too frequently either they have suffered data loss or their owners are asking thousands of dollars for them (or both). Please donate to the Dumping Union if and when you can!

My personal Holy Grail is going to be different from everyone else's. I've never played it and have no idea what it looks like. It might not even be any good. However, back in the day when I ran what was then called the Dumping Project and eBay sniping sites were relatively new and I didn't trust them, it was the one ultra-rare game that I lost the auction for because, while waiting to place a bid on the only PCB for it that I had yet seen (or have ever seen) with moments remaining in the auction, my computer crashed...and the board vanished into the depths of a Japanese collector's hoard, never to be seen again. I deeply yearn for another copy to someday surface and be dumped so that I can stop kicking myself about that. That game would be "El Fin del Tiempo" ("The End of Time") by Spanish company Niemer. Sigh.