Opinions needed: Ethical dilemma

elekTRONarcade

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So I've got a bit of an ethical dilemma I need some help with, concerning converting boards. I've been toying with the idea of converting some cheaper boardsets to harder-to-find boards, i.e. SF2T to Willow or Strider. So here's the dilemma....

First, would converting boards like Clutch Hitter to Moonwalker be considered unethical if at some point you decided to sell that board? I'm not talking about selling it at a typical Moonwalker price of course, maybe midway between the average Clutch Hitter price and Moonwalker price.

Second, would it be bad form to convert them in the first place? My concern is that by doing so, you're essentially destroying one of the few remaining CH boards and flooding the market with a faux MW board.

My plan isn't to actually mass produce cheap bootleg conversion boards for resale, but merely to create some harder-to-find boards for personal use. But at some point if I ever decided to sell one of them for whatever reason, I wanted to find out if there is a general moral consensus about doing so.
 
Personally I'm of the opinion that as long as you tell people they are getting a converted board, there's no ethical problem there - it's only if you represent it as being original that you's be unethical on a sale.

I leave the matter of whether you should or not to others (pulls out fire proof shield to watch from behind...)
 
I walked away from this hobby a number of years ago because I was disgusted at the flood of Chinese MAME pirate boards just completely taking over the hobby and laying waste to the value of virtually everything, complete games, parts, etc. etc.

A bit older, a bit less cranky now, and I'm back in the hobby, but it seems in general, people tolerate and co-exist with "MAME pirate board" folks who seem to have zero regard whatsoever for the IP rights of say, Namco, Williams, Nintendo, etc. etc.

So if there is a tolerance for people openly dealing in pirate MAME stuff, I can't imagine how anyone can have the moral high ground taking issue with EPROM conversions. Hell, at least you are dealing with all original licensed hardware, you're really just swapping EPROMS (and maybe a PAL or two). Grey area/slippery slope, sure, but in my book, at LEAST you're still doing something that preserves the value and worth of original manufacturer hardware.

Rock on with those conversions!
 
It's impossible to do anything unethical to a game board.

"Ethics" would come into the picture if you misrepresented it when you sold it....

You could throw it in the trash and it wouldn't be unethical, and you could charge 10,000 bucks for it and it wouldn't be unethical.... but if you sold somebody 1 thing and told them it was something else, that would be unethical.
 
Go right ahead with them. Clutch Hitter for example is one of the best jamma baseball titles, but there is very little demand for the board (or for most sports titles, video game collectors of all kinds have always turned their nose up at non-gimmick sports title).

The demand for Moonwalker is quite high. Convert the board to moonwalker and it will be treasured and will get played. Leave it as Clutch Hitter and it will sit in a stack of boards in a priority mail box and get sold off to someone else for $25 every few years until the post office finally destroys it.
 
Thanks guys, I appreciate the input from all of you. Some of you stated its fine to sell as long as you inform the buyer (which I wouldn't have done any other way). What about the price point for a converted board compared to an original dedicated board?
 
About the only other thing I would do if you have the skills would be to brand the bin files before you burn them so that somewhere in the self test or on the attract screen it displays some indication that it's a conversion.

While you might not resell it without disclosing that it's not an original doesn't mean the next person down the line would be so honest.
 
About the only other thing I would do if you have the skills would be to brand the bin files before you burn them so that somewhere in the self test or on the attract screen it displays some indication that it's a conversion.

While you might not resell it without disclosing that it's not an original doesn't mean the next person down the line would be so honest.


That's a really good idea. That would be my only qualm with ever reselling them...the next owner buying them and selling them off as originals purely for profit.
 
In my eyes, like many others, that as long as you don't sell it as "100% original" your fine. I do venture to say that it can be an original to some extent in that it runs on the original hardware and isn't being emulated, so there is merit there. It's hard to truly say original on most games anyway since over the years have roms been replaced when a chip dies? I mean I consider my Robotron original but it has a burned set of roms I bought years ago to upgrade to blue.
 
Educate me more on these "conversions" you indicated. Are we just talking ROM swaps or do they involve jumpering wires / modifying traces / changing components or connectors / etc.? If it's only a ROM swap and the board isn't physically labeled as any specific game then I wouldn't even consider that a conversion.
 
Since you're ~new, you probably haven't done some of the research that will stop these dreams in their tracks, so I'll help you out.

First of all, Moonwalker and Clutch Hitter use completely different daughterboard/B-boards, so good luck with that ;) You need an original MW AND a working CH board to perform that "conversion."

Converting CPS2 game boards, requires expensive and rare EPROMs, in addition to already working hardware.

Willow or Strider (comparatively easy conversions) don't sell particularly fast or high enough to bother.


The same or similar holds true for many of the conversions I'm sure you plan to attempt. In short, you will find this not to be a profitable or worthwhile venture, regardless of the game(s) chosen.
 
Since you're ~new, you probably haven't done some of the research that will stop these dreams in their tracks, so I'll help you out.

First of all, Moonwalker and Clutch Hitter use completely different daughterboard/B-boards, so good luck with that ;) You need an original MW AND a working CH board to perform that "conversion."

Converting CPS2 game boards, requires expensive and rare EPROMs, in addition to already working hardware.

Willow or Strider (comparatively easy conversions) don't sell particularly fast or high enough to bother.

The same or similar holds true for many of the conversions I'm sure you plan to attempt. In short, you will find this not to be a profitable or worthwhile venture, regardless of the game(s) chosen.

I have both MW and CH, two each in fact. I've successfully swapped the daughter board/CPU from my semi-working MW to one of the CHs and it works just fine. See my previous Moonwalker thread regarding lockups mid-play to see why I did the swap.

As for the second MW/CH, I bought the nonworking MW for this very reason; to use the daughter board and PALs from and attempt a Phoenix-like resurrection of a dead board, using my second CH. I assure you, I may be new to this but I do have some common sense and no grand illusions as to what to expect.


Educate me more on these "conversions" you indicated. Are we just talking ROM swaps or do they involve jumpering wires / modifying traces / changing components or connectors / etc.? If it's only a ROM swap and the board isn't physically labeled as any specific game then I wouldn't even consider that a conversion.

Not completely rewired/retraced bootleg boards, no. I have no plans on doing this on some large grand scale with tons of boards, merely to follow existing swap practices discovered by other people to transform a few cheaper CPS1 boards to harder-to-find boards that I may not otherwise ever own due to price, like Willow, Strider and Ghouls n Ghosts/Ghosts n Goblins.

To me, rom swaps would be considered the far less cheap and taudry method of obtaining hard-to-find games as opposed to MAME
 
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In the Neogeo scene, this is considered heresy unless you plan to keep it for yourself. But then again its your hardware and you do what you want with it; but for karma's sake, If I was you and I would mention to a potential buyer that this is a convertion job.

Imagine if the guy runs into problems later on, and discover that the board he paid a pretty penny for is actualy not original..
 
Nothing that already hasn't been said in this thread before, but offering up my opinion...If it is for your own personal purposes, do whatever you want. Only your own conscience can make those decisions for you. If you're dealing with the public, however, I'd just make sure you're on the up and up with telling people they're conversions. What happens after you sell them to someone else is out of your hands; at that point I wouldn't worry about it. And yeah, I'd knock money off because they are conversions and not originals.
 
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