Outside of monetary value - which you all seem hung up on - they have no collector value, either. Nobody
wants a bootleg PCB (even to play), but they'll take it for free until they can get a real one. Notice the 'FREE' qualifier, and the fact that it would be replaced by real hardware at the first opportunity
Disagreed re: value to collectors. I've been collecting since the early 1990s and, with a few notable exceptions, am typically more interested in bootlegs these days than original machines. The near-zero monetary worth of the majority of bootlegs doesn't escape me, but they are a part of arcade history and as such have intrinsic value.
Does anyone 'collect' Chinese multiboards or modern Korean bootlegs? No. No, they do not. Because only original hardware has any value at all to arcade COLLECTORS (which is what this place is for, btw) - monetary or otherwise.
While I am generally the first to call out
x-in-1 boards as being completely crap, if someone wants to collect them then I don't believe that that makes them any less of a collector. Their tastes may not mesh with mine, but I don't recall there being a written rule that collectors can only be considered collectors if they have certain games or types of games.
As an example: on the video game floor at Arcade Expo in Banning, CA this year there was a Duramold Bubbles running the game from a 60-in-1 (IIRC). Now, I'm not going to debate the originality of the game; it's pretty clear that running off of a 60-in-1 and not an original PCB pretty much makes the game non-original. But does doing that make the owner any less of a collector?
Total newbs and bottom-feeders might keep them around, but vets know better and dispose of them appropriately.
Well, if for no other reason than enlightened self-interest, those same collectors should probably be keeping them around. Let's say someone's Galaga dies and it's going to take time to obtain an original PCB. What's closer to the original as a stop-gap solution: a dedicated Gallag PCB or Galaga on an
x-in-1?
This also opens up the door to debating both the worth and value of things like JROK's FPGAs, multigames on dedicated hardware (Multi-Pac, etc.), and DEXTER. Are people using these or similar items in their games no longer considered collectors?
I realise that much of the above has no hard-and-fast answers and never will. But to my mind the types of games that someone chooses to collect doesn't make them more or less of a collector.