I now understand your logic, but it's flawed.  These are not production boards with the cases pulled off, these are development boards.  They have EPROMs (not ROMs) put in by the developers of the games before they were to be mass produced.  A product made strictly for testing or preview purposes to determine functionality BEFORE mass production is a prototype, that's just what they are.

I think you have to educate yourself a bit on the hardware used during the cartridge based media days of gaming to understand why these are prototypes.  You seem to be much more interested in the data than the hardware, which is totally understandable.  Many people don't care about the actual proto hardware, they just want to see an early game.  If I were to sell the DUMPS of these protos, then I can see your side.  That would be a pretty scummy underhanded tactic to sell someone the finished build of the game just because it came from a prototype.  I agree with that 100%.  That wasn't the case with my sale though, I was selling the actual prototypes so collectors of protoype media (like myself) could enjoy it.  I try to be crystal clear in my descriptions as to what is the final version, what is early in development, and so forth.

Let me ask you a question using your logic.  I have 8 different prototype builds of Heavyweight Championship Boxing for the Gameboy, all with different dates, all at different points in development:

[img:124b7e07f1]http://i113.photobucket.com/albums/n223/mrmark0673/Protos/100_1673.jpg[/img:124b7e07f1]

Would you call them 7 prototypes and a finished version created by the developers to test before they became mass produced?  That seems sort of silly if you ask me, but to each their own I guess.

Your reasoning is the exact reason why I will never do a community dump for my stuff and also why I will no longer participate in community dumps (the last one I helped with was Mike Tyson's Intergalactic Power Punch).  I sell the actual, tangible prototype, and I let people know ahead of time what they are going to purchase.  I rarely sell stuff though, I'm just recently trying to focus exclusively on NES prototypes, many of which can be seen here:  http://www.nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=35&amp;threadid=24917

About the whole collecting community "fixing" this, you're just way off base.  Like I said before, your greatest problem is that you can't tell the difference between dev and retail PCBs and that you focus exclusively on the data, which has NOTHING to do with determining if something is a prototype.  Everything I had for sale were prototypes, some were clearly labeled as being the final version, some were early builds.  I collect protos of final versions with relative frequency I just bought this the other day:

[img:124b7e07f1]http://i113.photobucket.com/albums/n223/mrmark0673/Protos/100_1670.jpg[/img:124b7e07f1]

Final version, still a proto.

Not to get defensive, I agree with you on many points.  If you can get beyond the "data" making a proto a proto, I think you'll have an easier time.  Again, if I were selling dumps I TOTALLY agree with you, retail data is just retail data.