the_wizard_666

It's not great, but not terrible either. Doesn't live up to the first one though...

I'd like to say you are too, but I know you faaaaaar too well for that But let's be real - this thread has more or less morphed to a Sharedata/AGCI info pool at this point. Chiller is a good chunk of it, but I think we've more or less moved on from the "is it or isn't it retail" question for the time being. So you're basically the only one posting useless stuff in a consistent manner. I have yet to see a post from you that actually contributes something to the discussion. You just keep coming in, tossing insults, slagging any opinion that doesn't line up with yours, and just generally being a dick. I love you like family man, but your posts are what's making this thread cringe-worthy, not @fcgamer. Some of his posts may be irrelevant, but ALL of yours have been too. He's at least providing something to discuss, or at least leads to follow. Which really makes me wonder why you're posting at all? I get that, but the fact that I typed out my reply long before you would've made yours means either you're extremely slow to type, or are just trying to pump your post count by not using the multi-quote functionality that I earlier taught you how to use

Dude, he literally JUST RESPONDED to my reply stating the same thing (in a far more civil manner) and agreed with that point. Read the whole thread before slinging mud man. EDIT: Better yet, don't sling the mud. It does nothing except make you look bad.

How many of the Action 52 carts were offloaded overseas? I got mine from Hakan (sp), who had tons of them. There were several other people in Europe that had a bunch too. Likely they sold extremely poorly, and then the inventory was liquidated. I even recall someone ( @NationalGameDepot IIRC) who interviewed a guy from Active Enterprises that was completely dumbfounded that the carts even saw the light of day. Irrelevant to my pursuits, but someone may wanna check in on that. Regardless, the number of available Action 52 carts is in no way indicative of how many ShareData Chiller carts are out there.

You're not helping either dude. You can't toss fuel on the fire and then blame the fire for burning. Without confirmation from past sellers, we have no way of validating any of that. It doesn't prove or disprove anything. The only ones we can consider are the ones who's provenance can be determined. And the only copies to have any sort of provenance are @Ferris Bueller's cart, and @NESWORLD's cart. The rest, unless someone chimes in, could have come from anywhere. Also, who's to say the random eBay sellers weren't former Color Dreams employees as well? Or ShareData employees for that matter? While your recollections are interesting, they're simply conjecture, nothing more, nothing less.

On a site that no longer exists. And even if it did, the fact that you'd have to dig through archives and long-dead posts to find it, and that YOU are posting it here for the FIRST TIME without his consent, AND he requested it be taken down after you did...the fact that you found it on the internet doesn't mean you have the right to distribute the picture.

Cool, I'll save them as is then. LOL! I tried my best to keep it going, but you know, people gonna people.

Makes me wish I had some compromising photos of you kicking around. Just to prove a point.

I'm not sure if the screenshots were from the Times article, but since I have that, I'll post it. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b4nAr0T7ldQRpsrRgIRRNSXUyGAdCe5k/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=102257403836446438292&rtpof=true&sd=true

No wonder I couldn't find any further information on it

Free expression is great until it infringes on someone else's rights. He obviously doesn't want it posted anymore. And it's not like he can run to NA and remove it from the archives. In this case, you're simply being a bully, and if there's a shred of morality in you you'd just acquiesce to the reasonable request to remove it.

Speculation indeed, but something to consider nonetheless. I can't seem to find any info about the injunction though, but I also don't know where to start looking either. Court docs would likely shed some light on things in that regard.

Honestly, my interest is going well beyond Chiller at this point. I'm interested in the company as a whole. It's kind of a neat little rabbit hole. So yeah, I don't need to prove or disprove anything to feel validated - consolidating information and drawing some semblance of a company profile is my end reward.

So tell me how exactly my statement is wrong? He kept a cart. It's not known whether Sharedata knew he did, but odds are they didn't. I suggested that he (and probably other) CD employees may have had carts made for them to keep because there is always a possibility that this was done. It's technically theft, so there won't be any evidence about it, but the possibility is there. I think it's more likely that they're Sharedata rejects, but there's no way to know that for certain.

It does make me wonder why the ad was kept up for four months, including a revision after the first two. Gonna have to dig through some court records and shit I guess.

You are a terrible liar dude. Just edit the picture out, it's entirely unnecessary, and clearly he doesn't want it out there. Yeah, but it's NOT common in the NES realm. Color Dreams was manufacturing these carts for ShareData. If I were ShareData, I'd be trying to glean every bit of info that I could off of it so I could source the parts directly instead of through a middleman. And if I were Color Dreams, I would do everything I could to make that as difficult as possible. It's pertinent data that would hint at the purpose of the carts. If you weren't just blindly hostile to the person who posted it, you might've seen that connection yourself. I haven't actually read through the NYT article yet, although I did a bit of editing to make it readable (copy/pasted into Word and deleted the adverts). I was referring to the other snippets you'd posted. Or were they from the same article? That may be part of the confusion on my part

To be fair, he probably found that picture through a public entity. Granted he shouldn't be reposting it, but in fairness you let that picture out into the public record. The chips being scrubbed do have bearing though. It shows that they didn't want to just give trade secrets to ShareData...like, y'know, who their suppliers were and whatnot. It's actually very relevant data.

That's some solid info. It could be that this answers why AGCI made their own carts in the first place. If they were sending copies to ShareData, then they were leaving the company's hands... First, I said at the start of that post that it was not intended to be taken as fact, but as my ruminations on the subject based on the evidence provided so far. That said, Phil Mikkelson is potentially the source of one cart, and he was a Color Dreams employee at the time. Thus at least one CD employee ended up with a ShareData Chiller cart. Clearly, this means he kept the cart - whether or not it was made for him specifically or if he took one from what was to be sent to Sharedata, either way he ended up with a cart that he probably shouldn't have had. So the statement stands.

I'm taking all points, and refining as necessary. My current theory (aka not to be taken as fact in any way) would be that: ShareData planned to release the game. They took out the ads, and in the month or two before it hit the press, they were working with Color Dreams to manufacture their games. Color Dreams made some Chiller carts for ShareData to use. Meanwhile, ShareData was, for indeterminate reasons, forming AGCI to publish their NES games. This part is unclear - were the carts sent back to Color Dreams? Were they used to fill orders that popped up before AGCI was created? The circumstantial evidence we do have points to the former. Strangely, aside from the shells and front labels, and using mask ROMs, AGCI Chiller is otherwise manufactured using Color Dreams stock, implying that ShareData/AGCI used their parts, at least until they could source their own AGCI branded boards. I'd have to double check this, but the back labels also appear to be Color Dreams stock. Some Color Dreams employees kept (or possibly made) Chiller carts for themselves. This may have been done without ShareData's knowledge. So the odds here are that they were NOT released at a retail level, though nothing can be definitively proven one way or another. As it sits now, there is no way anyone could add it to the retail release list without more information. Start scouring the archives folks!

He posted some article snips earlier in the thread. I quoted it on this page so you can see it. I also have the NYT article he's mentioning. That said, they point more to the financial state of the company long after the fact, and are pretty irrelevant to the Chiller debate (although I still love seeing it as it's gonna help fill some gaps). @fcgamer, I'll be a bit blunt here. Some of the stuff you post really comes off as a jumbled mess of thoughts. There's definitely good information to be had there, but you aren't exactly presenting it in ways that are well thought out. I admire your passion, but you might want to reread posts before making them, just to make sure everything is presented in the way you intend it to be perceived. Also, to both of you, the hostility is counterproductive. We really all want the same thing here - for the truth to come out. Let's leave the personal shit out of it, and debate in a civil fashion. You don't change minds by screaming "you're wrong" and bonking someone on the head. You do it by framing well thought out arguments, putting facts and sources on the table, and working to debunk theories instead of just being argumentative. It's hard enough to piece this together with all the data being drowned out by chaff.

So basically one is from a lot that is alleged to have been from someone with some sort of connection to a company (if @Ferris Bueller could specify which company, assuming it wasn't mentioned in his original post, that'd be swell), and the other was probably (though not definitively) attributed to Phil Mikkelson, who worked for Color Dreams and neither ShareData OR AGCI. Assuming the company referenced by Mr. Bueller is also Color Dreams, what this says to me is that the carts were likely done as a proof of concept for ShareData and manufactured by Color Dreams. For whatever reason, ShareData went with manufacturing their own carts instead of using Color Dreams shells. What those reasons were is unknown at this time. Whether there was a batch that ShareData used to fill orders, or if they were rejected, that is what is unclear. But at least it points to a reason for them to exist in Color Dreams shells.

Thanks. And you do it by clicking the quote button on the first one, going to the next page, clicking the reply box to bring back your prior post info, and then quoting the second one. VGS automatically saves what you've typed in case you navigate away and return to your post later...you just need to click the box to access it

Point me to those references. I didn't see Martin reference where it came from, but I may have simply overlooked it. As for the other, my reskimming of the thread brought nothing to light, and my eyes hurt too much from that pass to go check again

Hey Dave, are these snippets all you have, or are these bits from longer articles? I know some of these sort of articles were tiny blurbs, but the formatting makes me wonder if they're from bigger articles. Or were they from the article you sent me? If this is the extent of what they are, I'll make due, but I'd like to check out the full listings and have sources for them if possible. If it's not possible though, no worries, I'll use what's here to track down further info. To anyone else, I have no idea how to navigate searches for potentially relevant business info (without signing up for services I don't wanna pay for anyway). If anyone knows where to go to find it, or can source the info themselves, your help would be greatly appreciated. A lot of stuff should be available through public archives, but not knowing how to navigate them is a bit of a problem for me. And if you don't wanna post it here, or wish to remain anonymous, PM me anything you can get. I'll keep looking, but I'm also a student in the midst of a job hunt, so yeah, time is a premium commodity for me. Anything on ShareData from, say, '88 onward, or AGCI at all should make for an okay starting point. Anything from patents to lawsuits to business info to financial data, all of it could potentially shed some light for me. I'd like to solve the Chiller issue, but there's so little known about the company as a whole that I would like to put together as much as I possibly can about them. Knowing who we're dealing with can at the very least give us plausible hypotheses rather than straight up conjecture.

That makes sense then. One of the biggest complaints against Nintendo in a few antitrust lawsuits was how often they would make slight changes in the lockout chip. Unlicensed companies had a lot of trouble keeping up because of it. This was likely a slight modification done to counter a lockout update.