This may sound silly, but I just want to know:  If you are a developer that has made custom cartridges, have you gone the extra mile and made up boxes and manuals for them as well?  I know there's little point, but I'm curious if anyone's ever done such a thing.  I'd be amused by it, really.

Manuals are very common (almost expected) in the Atari homebrew market.  I think only albailey and my carts are the ones with printed manuals in the NES market.  Getting real printed paperboard boxes will likely never happen because a minimum order is 1000 boxes.  That can come down if you use one of the standard sizes (6"x6"x1" is closest to NES) and use something like one color lithography instead of printing, but it is still expensive.

Yeah, I looked into paper boxes.  One place wanted $300 for the custom die and another  $375 for the layout setup.   I have no clue what the cost per box would have been on top of that but it would have been insane for a small number of carts.

I just went with Candy tins.   They're still  about $3 a piece, but they are almost the same size as a NES box.

I think the only practical way to do the boxes is to get a bunch of homebrewers to go in together on a large order of generic boxes, and then print a custom sticker for the front.  (I think thats all Sachen does.)

Al

I actually like the way Al done it better than having a real paper box.  It makes it very collectable cause you about have to display it more so than put it on a shelf.  Plus you can feel the amount of work and quality in his by seeing all the specialy little touches:  the seal of adquacy, the made in Canada back label, the whitty comments, the homebrew series.  Such a cool project.
~~NGD

I haven't seen Albailey's box - was there a pic of it somewhere?

On the main page here :)

I've got another idea for boxes.
You know those clear plastic boxes that people use to protect their NES boxes.  You could probably print directly on those, or just apply a sticker.

 They should be cheap ( less than a dollar a piece), and a person (or collecting community) can buy them in bulk because regular collectors will want them to protect their existing NES boxes.

Al