It's a complicated issue, as much of what's floating around out there are FrankenProtos -- they've been cobbled together with legit boards and repro chips (or some other combination), and identification is, therefore, a tricky thing. The only thing that I can say is that the true Lynx protos usually don't self-advertise. If the circuit board describes itself as an "Atari proto" (or "Atari Eprom"), it probably isn't. I have a few of those in my collection, and I acquired all of them from Video 61 and/or B&C about eight to ten years ago. If you look at "Diag" and "BL", you can see that they're mounted on unusual circuit boards, and that leads me to the believe that they're valid.

 

 

You may, of course, consider FrankenProtos to be valid protos. Some people do.

 

There's the odd issue of Telegames. It appears that Telegames acquired quite a bit of old stock from Atari, and may have sold some protos in Telegames packaging when they ran out of stock. Telegames also issued a few copies of their games on their own, weird FrakenCarts. Are these protos or one-of-a-kinds? I have no idea.

 

The history of EotB is very strange -- I understand that several runs of carts were made before it was given a wider release a few years ago, and you can't quite describe those as pirate carts. What are they? They certainly have value -- for a time, some of the game-save carts were being offered for about $1000.

 

As I've said, though, the issue is complex, and it's not helped by the fact that there are so few Lynx collectors out there -- there isn't really a market for these things, and people therefore haven't been really keeping track of who has what. I probably have the biggest collection in Canada, but I haven't been careful with my documentation, and I have a mix of everything now. I also don't have any way of dumping the ROMS to check them, so all that I can say is that I have a few likely protos (including two that I purchased from that eBay seller), a "?" (my 'save' copy of EotB, and a few others), and a whole bunch of what are likely FrankenProtos.

Source: Worth of "released" protos