MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - byuu's blog post is the best source of info

> Reddit? I don't/won't read that site. What is the situation with these carts anyway?
> Is there no way to do it correctly/accurately with a cart adapter dumper thing and
> then split the data manually into the rom chunks?

Link to byuu's blog post on the matter

Whatever quarrel I have with the man himself, I have a huge amount of respect these days for the lengths that he's going to in order to preserve SNES, and I think he did a great job in this case of laying the facts out as he knows them, explaining the rationale at the time for the decisions that were made, and why certain things were not an option.

The salient points are:
- Insurance: Most shipping companies have a limit to insurance value. FedEx, for example is $2499.99, and USPS could be even lower. As for why it was not broken up into smaller packages, hindsight is 20/20.
- Sending Dumping Hardware: What byuu does is above and beyond, and I would say goes to Jason Scott levels of caring about preserving games. This includes some admittedly fragile hardware, and requires lots of scanning time as well.
- Sending Byuu: He reckons it would take him 2-3 months of presumably full-time work to do a job of 100 cartridges. Yeah, I tend to believe him. Paying for a flight and paying for his living expenses for 2-3 months could easily total to over the $10000 value of the package itself. And he's a fucking skilled guy, so his time would be valuable in excess of $750-$1000 a day based on my base contracting rate which is basically half that.

Personally I think he would find Europe a welcoming, beautiful, and charming place, as I first traveled to Sweden alone. But the expense of living there plus everything else just doesn't make sense for him to dump the games in situ.

Ultimately, the smartest thing to do in hindsight would have been to split the packages up by value less than the maximum insurance value, but that also might also have the downside of high shipping rates as well. Hindsight is 20/20, and who would have thought that this sort of package would get stolen? Of all things, who the hell steals PAL video game cartridges in the USA? What, is there some black market for PAL games in the USA that I don't know about? Unless the USPS and possibly local police step up their game, some unfortunate pawn shop owner is going to wind up with a box of $10000 worth of PAL SNES games. What a shitty situation, and what a pointless thing to steal. It's heartbreaking.