They say that hope springs eternal, and I'll be darned, but I still believe that there has to be at least one millionaire or billionaire out there who strongly believes in preserving digital history, and just doesn't know about the Dumping Union yet.
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It's a loose collective of about 30-50 arcade and digital preservation enthusiasts who keep each other apprised of various auctions, or personal acquisitions, for or of machines which have not yet had their contents preserved through emulation.
The folks involved are average working Joes with the ability to desolder and dump various ICs. The problem is that for any given auction, folks are usually only able to stump up a few bucks to a few tens of bucks, and rarer titles tend to run into the thousands of dollars.
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Context: An auction of Nintendo's 70's title "Monkey Magic" a few years ago hit $4k. I was able to stump up 3k of that due to being flush from a bonus at work, but those times are long gone for me. It was only the 2nd time the game ever showed up for auction in 2 decades.
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Meanwhile, there are even rarer titles of which only one are known to exist, like Taito's "Vertexer", where the one existing owner is looking for a low 5-figure sum. Outrageous? Yes. But when that board bitrots, that's it: The game is gone. Forever. Never re-released. No backups.
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